Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Aristotle

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Chandler, Raymond

14.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

16.

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

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

19.

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

Ashbery, John

20.

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

21.

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

Barrymore, John

22.

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.)

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

25.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

26.

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

Fowles, John

27.

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

Ackerman, Diane

28.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

33.

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

Engle, Paul

34.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

35.

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.

36.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

38.

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

Frost, Robert

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 a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

42.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

48.

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

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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

Temple, Sir William

50.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.