Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poets wish to profit or to please.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Sandburg, Carl

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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.

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.

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''

10.

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

Hare, David

11.

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

Graves, Robert

12.

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

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

15.

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.

16.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

Engle, Paul

19.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

20.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

21.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

26.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

27.

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

Barrymore, John

28.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

29.

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

Ashbery, John

30.

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

31.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

32.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

33.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

39.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

40.

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

Dickinson, Emily

41.

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

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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