Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Field, Eugene

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Ashbery, John

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

Aristotle

10.

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

11.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

Brodsky, Joseph

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

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

Horace

21.

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.

22.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

23.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

29.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

30.

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

31.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Diderot, Denis

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

37.

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

Engle, Paul

38.

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

Renard, Jules

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Morley, Christopher

45.

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

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

Horace

49.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

50.

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.