Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Cocteau, Jean

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

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.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Fowles, John

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

15.

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

Plath, Sylvia

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

25.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

26.

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

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

29.

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

30.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Dickinson, Emily

32.

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

Temple, Sir William

33.

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.

34.

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

Morley, Christopher

35.

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

Engle, Paul

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

37.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

40.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

41.

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.

42.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

43.

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

Chandler, Raymond

44.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

45.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.