Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Engle, Paul

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Aristotle

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

Ashbery, John

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

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

Diderot, Denis

16.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

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

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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

21.

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

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

24.

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

25.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

32.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

33.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

37.

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

Morley, Christopher

38.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

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

41.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

50.

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