Quotes About History

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.

All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.

In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.

I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

The applause of his native land is the richest reward to which the patriot ever aspires. It is this for which 'he bears to live or dares to die.' It is the high incentive to those achievements which illustrate the page of history and give to poetry its brightest charm.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.

I can probably go down in history as the best backup point guard ever in NBA history.

California is a bellwether state. California was the first state in the United States to overturn the laws against interracial marriage. It took 19 years for the rest of the country to come around to that point of view.

If you are asking for my point of view, I would say that the Palestinians should go back to Palestine.

The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view - not in its course, but in its consequences.

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.

History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of it.

We're fond of pointing out that we've known each other for over 25 years now and not once sat down alone to have dinner together. We pretty much avoid spending whatever time together that we can.