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

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.

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

Engle, Paul

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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''

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Barrymore, John

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

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

14.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

15.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

16.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

17.

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

18.

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

Dickinson, Emily

19.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

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

Horace

21.

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.

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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

Hardy, Thomas

28.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

32.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

Joyce, James

35.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

36.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

40.

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

41.

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

Morley, Christopher

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

47.

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

48.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

50.