Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Frost, Robert

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

10.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Morley, Christopher

15.

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

16.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

Hardy, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

25.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

26.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

27.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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''

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Ashbery, John

37.

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

Barrymore, John

38.

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

39.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

41.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

46.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

47.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.