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

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

Voltaire

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 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

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

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

Renard, Jules

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.)

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

10.

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

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

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

Plath, Sylvia

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

Morley, Christopher

15.

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.

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

18.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Field, Eugene

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

26.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

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

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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

33.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

Drew, Elizabeth

37.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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 at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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

Hardy, Thomas

45.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar