Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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''

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

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

11.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Ashbery, John

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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.

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.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

28.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Engle, Paul

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

41.

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

42.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

43.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

44.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

46.

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

Graves, Robert

47.

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.

48.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

50.

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