Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

14.

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

Ackerman, Diane

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

17.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Dickinson, Emily

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

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

Barrymore, John

28.

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

Fowles, John

29.

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

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.

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.

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Morley, Christopher

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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.

37.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

38.

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

Engle, Paul

39.

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

Hare, David

40.

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

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Marquis, Don

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

44.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

50.

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

Joubert, Joseph