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

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

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

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

Aristotle

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

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

10.

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

Renard, Jules

11.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Diderot, Denis

13.

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

Morley, Christopher

14.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Dickinson, Emily

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

26.

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

Fowles, John

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

31.

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

Barrymore, John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Graves, Robert

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

38.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

39.

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

Temple, Sir William

40.

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

45.

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

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

48.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.