Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Voltaire

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

Fowles, John

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.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Aristotle

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

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

Horace

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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.

12.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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.

16.

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

Joubert, Joseph

17.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

19.

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

Ackerman, Diane

20.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ashbery, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Hardy, Thomas

28.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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.

31.

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

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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.)

33.

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

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

Hare, David

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

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

Morley, Christopher

38.

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''

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

43.

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

Marquis, Don

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

47.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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

50.

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