Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Frye, Northrop

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

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

Fowles, John

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

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

Barrymore, John

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

Temple, Sir William

10.

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

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

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''

13.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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

Ackerman, Diane

15.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

16.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

18.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

19.

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.

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

22.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

23.

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

Frost, Robert

24.

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

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

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

Engle, Paul

30.

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

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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

32.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

33.

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.

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Marquis, Don

37.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

39.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

42.

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

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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