Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Fowles, John

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

Joyce, James

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

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 is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Ackerman, Diane

10.

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

Joubert, Joseph

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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.

15.

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

Woolf, Virginia

16.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

17.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

18.

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

19.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

28.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

29.

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

30.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Hare, David

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

43.

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.

44.

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''

45.

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

Horace

46.

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

Diderot, Denis

47.

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.

48.

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

Plath, Sylvia

49.

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

50.

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

Field, Eugene