Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Fowles, John

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

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

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Field, Eugene

12.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

13.

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

Chandler, Raymond

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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''

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

27.

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.

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

31.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

35.

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

Joyce, James

36.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

38.

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

39.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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.

46.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.