Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Fowles, John

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

10.

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

11.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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.

14.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

16.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

17.

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

18.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Diderot, Denis

23.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

24.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

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

27.

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

Dickinson, Emily

28.

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''

29.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

30.

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

31.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

32.

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.)

33.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

Hare, David

46.

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

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

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.