Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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''

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

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

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

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.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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.

23.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Chandler, Raymond

25.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Hardy, Thomas

31.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

32.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

33.

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

Hare, David

34.

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

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 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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

41.

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

Field, Eugene

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Fowles, John

46.

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

Morley, Christopher

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

50.

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