“All the poems of our lives are not yet made.”

—  Muriel Rukeyser

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 214

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All the poems of our lives are not yet made." by Muriel Rukeyser?
Muriel Rukeyser photo
Muriel Rukeyser 42
poet and political activist 1913–1980

Related quotes

Anne Frank photo

“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary
Diane Ackerman photo

“Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 3 “Taste” (p. 130)

Ataol Behramoğlu photo

“A poem is a living organism.”

Ataol Behramoğlu (1942) Turkish writer

The Poet's Poetic Responsibility (2012)

“Whole poems are made out of many single poems we call words... I am trying to recover a part of the poet's work which has been lost. Our first poets were the namers, not the rhymers.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

undated quote about his own poetry; in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015

“A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Poetry in War and Peace," Partisan Review (Winter 1945) [p. 133]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

“Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Children, st. 9 (1858).

Frank O'Hara photo

“It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Why I Am Not a Painter (l. 24-28) (1976).

“A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

Lives of the Poets, Phoenix, 1988

Lin Yutang photo

“Human life can be lived like a poem.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 32

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Related topics