Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Auden, W. H.

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

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Ashbery, John

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

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.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

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

Graves, Robert

12.

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''

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

18.

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

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

Fowles, John

21.

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.

22.

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

Joubert, Joseph

23.

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

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

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

28.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Cocteau, Jean

34.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Dickinson, Emily

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

42.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

47.

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

Ackerman, Diane

48.

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