Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Marquis, Don

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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.)

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

10.

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

Ashbery, John

11.

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

Fowles, John

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

18.

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

19.

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

Frost, Robert

20.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Plath, Sylvia

25.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

26.

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

Morley, Christopher

27.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

38.

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

39.

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

Diderot, Denis

40.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

48.

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.

49.

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

Horace

50.

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