Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

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Best Quotes about 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.

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.

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 blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

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

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

Renard, Jules

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

10.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

11.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

12.

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

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

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

Hardy, Thomas

15.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

17.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

19.

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

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

21.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

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

Temple, Sir William

23.

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

24.

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

Dickinson, Emily

25.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

26.

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

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

29.

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

Frost, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Joubert, Joseph

32.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

35.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

36.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

37.

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

Hare, David

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Aristotle

41.

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

42.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

43.

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

Marquis, Don

44.

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

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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