Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Ashbery, John

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Ackerman, Diane

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Hardy, Thomas

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

Renard, Jules

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.

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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

10.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

Frost, Robert

12.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Fowles, John

17.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

18.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

19.

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

Barrymore, John

20.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

Horace

24.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

25.

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

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

28.

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

29.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

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

31.

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''

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

36.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

37.

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

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

39.

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

40.

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

Graves, Robert

41.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

42.

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

45.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

46.

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Plath, Sylvia

50.

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

Woolf, Virginia