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

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

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.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Aristotle

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

Woolf, Virginia

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.

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

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

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

Ackerman, Diane

10.

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

Renard, Jules

11.

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

Frost, Robert

12.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

13.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Plath, Sylvia

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

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

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

20.

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

Hare, David

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

25.

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''

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Ashbery, John

29.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

30.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

31.

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

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

Marquis, Don

34.

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

Graves, Robert

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

Diderot, Denis

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Fowles, John

40.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

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

Morley, Christopher

43.

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

44.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

47.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

48.

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

Dickinson, Emily

49.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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.