Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Aristotle

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Chandler, Raymond

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Joubert, Joseph

18.

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

Hardy, Thomas

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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.

21.

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

Field, Eugene

22.

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

Ackerman, Diane

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

25.

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

Horace

26.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

30.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

31.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

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

Morley, Christopher

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

Ashbery, John

40.

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

41.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Diderot, Denis

44.

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

Hare, David

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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

50.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George