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

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

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

14.

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

Plath, Sylvia

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

18.

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

19.

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

Aristotle

20.

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

Joubert, Joseph

21.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

22.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

Chandler, Raymond

27.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

28.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

29.

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.

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Dickinson, Emily

35.

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

36.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Graves, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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''

43.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

44.

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.

45.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

46.

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