Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Temple, Sir William

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

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

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

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

Fowles, John

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

17.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

18.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

19.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

20.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

21.

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

22.

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

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.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

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

32.

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

Morley, Christopher

33.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

34.

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

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

44.

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

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

46.

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

Aristotle

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.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

50.

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.