Louis Untermeyer
Life, alas, is very drear. Up with the glass! Down with the beer!Collection: Funny
Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.Collection: Defining
Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.Collection: Friendship
Come, drink the mystic wine of Night, Brimming with silence and the stars; While earth, bathed in this holy light, Is seen without its scars.Collection: Stars
God, though this life is but a wraith, Although we know not what we use, Although we grope with little faith, Give me the heart to fight and lose.Collection: Heart
Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.Collection: Work
Nothing but blackness above And nothing that moves but the cars... God, if you wish for our love, Fling us a handful of stars!Collection: Stars
From compromise and things half done, Keep me with stern and stubborn pride; And when at last the fight is won, God, keep me still unsatisfied.Collection: Fighting
Why has our poetry eschewed The rapture and response of food? What hymns are sung, what praises said For home-made miracles of bread?Collection: Home
Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse?a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.Collection: Spring
She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.Collection: Life Is Like
It takes a heap o' children to make a home that's true,And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,Why, that's the sort of good old home for good old me and you.Collection: Mother