Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Aristotle

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

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.

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.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

Sandburg, Carl

12.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

19.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

20.

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

Ashbery, John

21.

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.

22.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

23.

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

24.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

25.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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.

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

Voltaire

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Field, Eugene

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

39.

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.

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

42.

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

43.

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

Hardy, Thomas

44.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

45.

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.

46.

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

Morley, Christopher

47.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Dickinson, Emily

49.

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

50.

Kennedy, John F.