Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

White, Elwyn Brooks

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

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

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

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

Plath, Sylvia

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

10.

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

11.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

15.

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

Graves, Robert

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Frye, Northrop

20.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Cocteau, Jean

21.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

22.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Stedman, Captain J. G.

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

Ashbery, John

33.

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

34.

The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Morley, Christopher

35.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

36.

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.

37.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Sandburg, Carl

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

Artaud, Antonin

43.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

44.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

45.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

46.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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