Famous Diogenes Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Diogenes poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous diogenes poems. These examples illustrate what a famous diogenes poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...I should have been a plumber fixing drains.
And mending pure white bathtubs for the great Diogenes
(who scorned all lies, all liars, and all tyrannies),
And then, perhaps, he would bestow on me -- majesty!
(O modesty aside, forgive my fallen pride, O hidden
majesty,
The lamp, the lantern, the lucid light he sought for
All too often -- sick humanity!)...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...THUS roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes,
Now serious am, now seek to please;
Now love and hate in turn one sees;
The motives now are those, now these;
Now nothings, now realities.
Thus roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes.
1810....Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...ht; and near
Democritus, who dreamed a world of chance
Born blindly in the whirl of circumstance;
And Anaxagoras, Diogenes,
Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles,
Zeno, were there; and Dioscorides
Who searched the healing powers of herbs and trees;
And Orpheus, Tullius, Livius, Seneca,
Euclid and Ptolem?us; Avicenna,
Galen, Hippocrates; Averrho?s,
The Master's great interpreter, - but these
Are few to those I saw, an endless dream
Of shades before whom Hell q...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...a huge trivett, or a monstrous chayre
With the heeles turn'd upward. How proper, O how fayre
A seate were this for old Diogenes
To grumble in and barke out oracles,
And answere to the Raven's augury
That builds above. Why grew not this strange tree
Neere Delphos? had this wooden majesty
Stood in Dodona forrest, then would Jove
Foregoe his oake, and only this approve.
Had those old Germans that did once admire
Deformed Groves; and worshipping with fire
Burnt men unto theyr go...Read more of this...
by
Strode, William
...lroad depot.
As I say, it was like a set of crystals in a chemist’s tube and a whispering pinch of salt.
I wonder what Diogenes who lived in a tub in the sun would have commented on the affair.
I know a shoemaker who works in a cellar slamming half-soles onto shoes, and when I told him, he said: “I pay my bills, I love my wife, and I am not afraid of anybody.”...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...WHEN Diogenes quietly sunn'd himself in his barrel,
When Calanus with joy leapt in the flame-breathing grave,
Oh, what noble lessons were those for the rash son of Philip,
Were not the lord of the world e'en for instruction too great!
1789.*...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...of his.
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three
years? he answerd, the same that made our friend Diogenes the
Grecian.
I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his
right & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men
into a perception of the infinite this the North American tribes
practise. & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience.
only for the sake of present ease or gratification?
___________________________________...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...nd all their works.
Down with the Turks.
Down with every army that fights against the soap-box,
The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,
The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box,
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box,
The Karl Marx, Henry George, Woodrow Wilson soap-box.
We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box,
The everlasting foe of beastliness and tyranny,
Platform of liberty: — Magna Charta liberty,
Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding Kansas liberty,
...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...More blest than was of old Diogenes,
I have not held my lantern up in vain.
Not mine, at least, this evil--to complain:
"There is none honest among all of these."
Our hopes go down that sailed before the breeze;
Our creeds upon the rock are rent in twain;
Something it is, if at the last remain
One floating spar cast up by hungry seas.
The secret of our being, who can tell?
To praise...Read more of this...
by
Levy, Amy
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