Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Graves, Robert

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Horace

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.)

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''

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

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

14.

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

15.

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

Field, Eugene

16.

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

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Dickinson, Emily

24.

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

Plath, Sylvia

25.

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

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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.

28.

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.

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Frost, Robert

36.

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

37.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

38.

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

39.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

40.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

41.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

42.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

44.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

45.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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