Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Ashbery, John

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Field, Eugene

10.

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.

11.

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

Barrymore, John

12.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

16.

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.

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.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Chandler, Raymond

21.

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

22.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

23.

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

Hare, David

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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

Dickinson, Emily

28.

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

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.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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.

33.

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

36.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

37.

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

38.

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

Morley, Christopher

39.

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

Plath, Sylvia

40.

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

Renard, Jules

41.

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

Horace

42.

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

Frost, Robert

43.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

Diderot, Denis

45.

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

46.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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