Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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.

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

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

10.

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

Graves, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

13.

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

14.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

15.

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

Marquis, Don

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

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

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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

19.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

20.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

27.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

28.

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

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

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

31.

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

Renard, Jules

32.

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.

33.

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

Ackerman, Diane

34.

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

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Dickinson, Emily

39.

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.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Plath, Sylvia

42.

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.)

43.

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

44.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

45.

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

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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.

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.