Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Marquis, Don

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

Barrymore, John

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

10.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

11.

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

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

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.

14.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

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

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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.

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

Dickinson, Emily

33.

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

Fowles, John

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

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

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Voltaire

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

40.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

41.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

45.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

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

Hare, David

48.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

49.

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

Frost, Robert

50.

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

Aristotle