Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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 the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Marquis, Don

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

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

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

Ashbery, John

10.

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

11.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

13.

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

14.

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

Dickinson, Emily

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Sandburg, Carl

18.

Drew, Elizabeth

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Eliot, T. S.

22.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

23.

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

Hardy, Thomas

24.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

25.

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

26.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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

30.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

32.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

33.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

34.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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.)

37.

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

Horace

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.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

43.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

44.

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

45.

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

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.