Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Ashbery, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Chandler, Raymond

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Field, Eugene

10.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

11.

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.

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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

Joyce, James

14.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

15.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

16.

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

Cocteau, Jean

17.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

18.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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.

21.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

22.

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

23.

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

Dickinson, Emily

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

28.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

29.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

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

Ackerman, Diane

36.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

38.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

39.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

40.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

41.

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

Morley, Christopher

42.

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

Hare, David

43.

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

44.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

46.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

47.

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

Aristotle

48.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

49.

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