For if my poems have always been about survival—and I believe they have been —then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.
​Jane Cooper,  Poet
Author of The Weather of Six Mornings
​Born October 9, 1924

Speaking of the Stonewall Inn riots: You know, the guys there were so beautiful. They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago. Defend the fairies!
​Allen Ginsberg,  Poet
Author of ​Howl and Other Poems
Born June 3, 1926

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man's own eyes when they look upon his own person. 
​Alexander Pope,  Poet
Author of "Rape of the Lock"
Born May 21, 1688

Cats have it all—admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.
Rod McKuen, Songwriter and Poet
Author of ​In Someone's Shadow
Born April 29, 1938

Genius is the capacity to retrieve childhood at will.
​Charles Baudelaire, Poet
Author of Invitation to a Voyage
Born April 9, 1821

Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.
Wilfred Owen, Poet
Author of "Arms of the Boy"
Born March 18, 1893

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital.
​Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Poet
Author of An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems
Born March 6, 1806

A WRITER'S WIT
Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.
​W. H. Auden
Author of The Age of Anxiety
Born February 21, 1907

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.
Annie Bethel Spencer, Poet
​Born February 6, 1882

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too.
Mary Oliver, Poet
Author of Dog Songs
Born September 10, 1935

What a Lover sees in the Beloved is the projected shadow of his own potential beauty in the eyes of God.
​Coventry Patmore
Author of The Angel in the House
Born July 23, 1823

To be exact has naught to do with pedantry or dogma.
Leonora Speyer,  Poet
Author of ​Fiddler's Farewell
​Born November 7, 1872

Reading is important—read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
​Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet
Author of ​We Real Cool
​Born June 7, 1917

A WRITER'S WIT
A man can do what is his duty; and when he says “I cannot,” he means, “I will not.”
​Johann Fichte
Author of Wissenschaftslehre (“Theory of Scientific Knowledge”)
​Born May 19, 1762

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
​Cecil Day-Lewis,  Poet and Novelist
Author of ​A Hope for Poetry
Born April 27, 1904

Love works in miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and stretching the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.
​Margaret of Valois-Angoulême, Poet
Author of Heptaméron
Born April 11, 1492

Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps
To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.
​Phyllis McGinley, Poet
Author of "The Conquerer"
​Born March 21, 1905

No use describing Yaddo—rundown rose gardens, rotting cantaloupes, fountains, a bust of Dante with a hole in the head, sets called Gems of Ancient Literature, Masterpieces of the World, cracking, dried up sets of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Balzac, Reminiscences of a Happy Life (the title of two different books), pseudo Poussins, pseudo Titians, pseudo Reynolds, pseudo and real English wood, portraits of the patroness, her husband, her lover, her children lit with tubular lights, like a church, like a museum . . . [from a letter to poet, Elizabeth Bishop]
​Robert Lowell,  Poet
Author of ​Life Studies
​Born March 1, 1917

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
​Elizabeth Bishop
Poet, Author of Geography III
Born February 8, 1911

A WRITER'S WIT
. . . the measure of the value of any work of fiction . . . is the worth of the speculations, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it.
​David Masson
Author of Edinburgh Sketches
​Born December 2, 1822

A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26,  1904

A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
​James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
​Born August 19, 1903

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
​Ted Hughes
Author of ​The Iron Man
​Born August 16, 1930 

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name.
—from "The Old Fools"
​Philip Larkin
Author of ​A Girl in Winter
​Born August 9, 1922

This the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.
​Elizabeth Hardwick
Author of Sleepless Nights
​Born July 27, 1916