Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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.)

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

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

Horace

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

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

10.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

11.

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

12.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

13.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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.

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

21.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Engle, Paul

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

28.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

29.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

30.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

Temple, Sir William

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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

36.

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

Dickinson, Emily

37.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

38.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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 what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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.

43.

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

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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

45.

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

Frost, Robert

46.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

49.

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

Morley, Christopher

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