Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Aristotle

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Plath, Sylvia

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Cocteau, Jean

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

Diderot, Denis

19.

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.

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

22.

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.

23.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

24.

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

25.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

27.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

28.

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

Joubert, Joseph

29.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

35.

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.

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

41.

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

Barrymore, John

42.

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

Hare, David

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.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

Hardy, Thomas

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Woolf, Virginia