Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Joyce, James

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Cocteau, Jean

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Horace

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Morley, Christopher

10.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

12.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Barrymore, John

16.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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

29.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

30.

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

Graves, Robert

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

33.

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

Dickinson, Emily

34.

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

Fowles, John

35.

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

Frost, Robert

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Plath, Sylvia

39.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

40.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

44.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

45.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Hardy, Thomas

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

48.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

49.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

50.

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