Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

- Farquhar, George

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

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.

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

Voltaire

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Morley, Christopher

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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.

21.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

22.

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

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

26.

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

27.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

28.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

29.

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

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

33.

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

Horace

34.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

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 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

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

Barrymore, John

40.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.