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 is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Horace

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Temple, Sir William

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''

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

10.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

11.

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

Frost, Robert

12.

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

Hare, David

13.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

14.

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

Aristotle

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

20.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

21.

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

Fowles, John

22.

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

Horace

23.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

24.

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

Field, Eugene

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

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

29.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

30.

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

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

35.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

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

Diderot, Denis

39.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

42.

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

Graves, Robert

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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

Barrymore, John

49.

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

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