Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

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

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Fowles, John

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

10.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

11.

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

Hardy, Thomas

12.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

13.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

19.

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

Horace

20.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

21.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

29.

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.

30.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

41.

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

Aristotle

42.

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