Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

- Ackerman, Diane

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

10.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

11.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Barrymore, John

12.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Frost, Robert

13.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Artaud, Antonin

14.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

16.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Marquis, Don

17.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Sandburg, Carl

18.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

20.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

21.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

22.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

24.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

Temple, Sir William

25.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

27.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

28.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Hare, David

30.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

31.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

32.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

33.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

34.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

35.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

36.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

37.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Ginsberg, Allen

38.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

39.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

42.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

Sandburg, Carl

44.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

46.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

47.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

48.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

50.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond