Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

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

Fowles, John

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Diderot, Denis

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

10.

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

Hare, David

11.

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

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

21.

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

Hardy, Thomas

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

27.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

28.

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

Eliot, T. S.

29.

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.

30.

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

Joubert, Joseph

31.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

32.

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

33.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

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

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

37.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

38.

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

Chandler, Raymond

39.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Barrymore, John

40.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

41.

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

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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

44.

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.

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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