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 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.

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Graves, Robert

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

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

12.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

Hare, David

15.

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

Fowles, John

16.

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

17.

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

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.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

27.

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.

28.

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

Ashbery, John

29.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

30.

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

31.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

32.

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

33.

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

Horace

34.

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.

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

37.

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

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

40.

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

Ackerman, Diane

41.

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

42.

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

43.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

48.

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

Field, Eugene

49.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.