Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

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

Horace

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

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Aristotle

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

13.

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

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

17.

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

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

24.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

25.

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

26.

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.)

27.

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

Plath, Sylvia

28.

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

29.

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

Barrymore, John

30.

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

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

34.

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

Diderot, Denis

35.

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

36.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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.

44.

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

Dickinson, Emily

45.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

46.

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

47.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Joubert, Joseph