Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Voltaire

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

10.

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

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Ackerman, Diane

15.

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

Fowles, John

16.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

21.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Aristotle

27.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

31.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

32.

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.

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

35.

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

Renard, Jules

36.

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

Field, Eugene

37.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

38.

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

Horace

39.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

Plath, Sylvia

41.

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

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace