Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fowles, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Horace

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

Hare, David

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

Temple, Sir William

19.

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

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

22.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

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

Chandler, Raymond

25.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

26.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Morley, Christopher

31.

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

32.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

39.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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.)

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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''

46.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

47.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

48.

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

Aristotle

49.

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

Barrymore, John

50.

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.