Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fitzhugh, C.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Aristotle

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Sandburg, Carl

12.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Dickinson, Emily

14.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

17.

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

18.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Renard, Jules

27.

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

Field, Eugene

28.

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

Joubert, Joseph

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

33.

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

Morley, Christopher

34.

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

Joyce, James

35.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

36.

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

Diderot, Denis

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

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

Ashbery, John

42.

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

43.

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

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

Voltaire

45.

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

46.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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