Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Joyce, James

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Scott, Sir Walter

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Baudelaire, Charles

10.

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

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

Aristotle

13.

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

Dickinson, Emily

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

16.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

17.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Ackerman, Diane

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

25.

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''

26.

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

Horace

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.

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

Horace

29.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

30.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

31.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

35.

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

36.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

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

39.

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

Field, Eugene

40.

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

41.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

45.

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.)

46.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

47.

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.

48.

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

Voltaire

49.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

50.

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