Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

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

Horace

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

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.

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

10.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

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

Horace

17.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

25.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

26.

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

Hardy, Thomas

27.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

28.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Morley, Christopher

30.

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

Temple, Sir William

31.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

32.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

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

Chandler, Raymond

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

40.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Ashbery, John

44.

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

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

47.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

48.

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

Dickinson, Emily

49.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

50.

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.