Selected Poems Quotes

“So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold

On a dream she wants.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers;
I remember all you forget.
I will die as many times
as you make me over again.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Get off this estate."
"What for?"
"Because it's mine."
"Where did you get it?"
"From my father."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his father."
"And where did he get it?"
"He fought for it."
"Well, I'll fight you for it.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“The worn tired stars say
you shall die early and die dirty.
The clean cold stars say
you shall die late and die clean.

The runaway stars say
you shall never die at all,
never at all.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love letters.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“You must expect to be in several lost causes before you die.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“The fog comes on little cat feet.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“What of the Athenian last year on whose bosom
a committee hung a medal to say to the world
here is a champion heavyweight poet?
He stood on a two-masted schooner
and flung his medal far out on the sea bosom.
“And why not?
Has anybody ever given the ocean a medal?
Who of the poets equals the music of the sea?
And where is a symbol of the people
unless it is the sea?”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.
Maybe the mothers of the world,
And the life that pours from their torsal folds—
Maybe it’s all a lie sworn by liars,
And a God with a cackling laughter says:
“I, the Almighty God,
I have made all this,
I have made it for kaisers, czars and kings.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you'll never read him unless you consider rainbows.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“I told her I felt kind of restless about the new poetry and I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries, conceding a fair batting average to Dante and Keats for what they wrote about love and roses and the moon.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Shall the squid have praise or blame for being a squid?
Shall the bird have compliments for being born with wings?”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“The moon is a cadaver and a dusty mummy and a damned rotten investment.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“The one-eyed mollusc on the sea-bottom, feathered and luminous, is my equal in what he and I know of star clusters not yet found by the best of star-gazers.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“These wheels within wheels
These leaves folded in leaves
These wheeling winds
and winding leaves
Those sprockets
from those seeds
This spiral shooting
from that rainfall-
What does a turning earth
say to its axis?
How should a melon say thanks
Or a squash utter blessings?”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from
the earth or a sunken glass house on
the sea-bottom amid fish and feather-
stars unless a bet that man can shove
on beyond yesterday's record of man
the hoper, the believer?”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Papa
what is the moon
supposed to advertise?”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“The lawyers know
a dead man's thoughts too well.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“I'd live in the fields on hard corn for a just cause.
Yes, for a just cause I'd live in the fields
On hard corn.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“If the Lord should come
He'd change you to nothing
for there's nothing to you.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“He had ten hopes to your one.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“He had no mother but Mother Jones
Crying from a jail window of Trinidad:
“All I want is room enough to stand
And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Presents are delivered from the sky,
in every package a prize, a chance,
to choke, to suffocate, to forget,
yes to forget every last word ever spoken of
man higher in the scale than animal creation,
the gorilla and the tiger being mere beasts
while man has shrines, altars, lights,
books awarding him personal immortality,
books not yet banned nor burned.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“I say now, by God, only fighters today will save the world”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes,”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg

“Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.”
― Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems: The Finest Representative American Poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg