Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Field, Eugene

12.

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

Hardy, Thomas

13.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

15.

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

Voltaire

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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.

19.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

20.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

21.

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

Fowles, John

22.

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

Chandler, Raymond

23.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Joyce, James

26.

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

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

30.

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

Dickinson, Emily

31.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

32.

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

Morley, Christopher

33.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

34.

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

35.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Renard, Jules

41.

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

Horace

42.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Hare, David

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

45.

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''

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Aristotle

49.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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.