Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

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

Barrymore, John

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

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

Diderot, Denis

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Graves, Robert

10.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

Temple, Sir William

13.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

14.

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

15.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Morley, Christopher

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Eliot, T. S.

21.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

Engle, Paul

24.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Ashbery, John

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

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.

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 the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

43.

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.

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

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

Fowles, John

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

50.

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

Marquis, Don