Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Aristotle

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

10.

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

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

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

13.

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

Horace

14.

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.)

15.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

16.

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

17.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

18.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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.

26.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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

29.

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

Chandler, Raymond

30.

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

Ashbery, John

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

33.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

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

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

37.

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

Dickinson, Emily

38.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

Field, Eugene

42.

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.

43.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Joubert, Joseph

48.

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

49.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

50.

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

Horace