Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Field, Eugene

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

10.

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

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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.

15.

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

Barrymore, John

16.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Ashbery, John

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Plath, Sylvia

20.

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

Joubert, Joseph

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

23.

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

Fowles, John

24.

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

25.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

26.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

Chandler, Raymond

28.

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

Engle, Paul

29.

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

Horace

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

Morley, Christopher

33.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

34.

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

35.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

36.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

Sandburg, Carl

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

41.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

42.

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.

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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.

45.

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

Diderot, Denis

46.

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

Graves, Robert

47.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

48.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

49.

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

50.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph