Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Best Quotes about 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

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.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Joyce, James

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

Ashbery, John

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

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

Voltaire

10.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

11.

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

12.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

13.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

14.

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.

15.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

16.

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

Hare, David

17.

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

Fowles, John

18.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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.

20.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

21.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

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

26.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

27.

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

Dickinson, Emily

28.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

29.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

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.

35.

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

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Joubert, Joseph

37.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

38.

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

39.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

40.

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

41.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

42.

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

Frost, Robert

43.

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

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

47.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

48.

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

Graves, Robert

49.

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

Temple, Sir William

50.

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