Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

10.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

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.

13.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Ashbery, John

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Graves, Robert

17.

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

Sandburg, Carl

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

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

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.

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

25.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

29.

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

Diderot, Denis

30.

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

31.

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

32.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Hare, David

34.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

36.

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.)

37.

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.

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

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

Hardy, Thomas

46.

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

47.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.