Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Dickinson, Emily

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Aristotle

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

Voltaire

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

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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Frost, Robert

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

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.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Barrymore, John

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

18.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

Temple, Sir William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

24.

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.

25.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

26.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

31.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Frye, Northrop

34.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Field, Eugene

41.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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