The 20th Century in Poetry Quotes

“Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours. It is just that so often they live till their hair is white. They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers … Nobody”
― Michael Hulse, The 20th Century in Poetry

“Not to have known about this! That here, That nowhere else in the wasteful, wilful, Death-wishing world, here Röntgen focused his ray And the eye first saw right through the skin, So that now without knives we see what is wrong Or is going to be wrong. We still need a ray To coax the delicate wings from the commonplace husk And detect why the horde we are destroys itself.”
― Michael Hulse, The 20th Century in Poetry

“Look at it this way, that way, face the thing squarely. Could some fool in a laboratory, he’d asked his assistants, Blow up the world with this? You could pay dearly For probing too deeply into that dark resistance Where light lay coiled in stone. He”
― Michael Hulse, The 20th Century in Poetry

“In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.”
― Michael Hulse, The 20th Century in Poetry