Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

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

Auden, W. H.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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.

10.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

11.

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.

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

Horace

14.

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.

15.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Joubert, Joseph

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

Ashbery, John

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

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

Chandler, Raymond

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

31.

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

Renard, Jules

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

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

37.

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

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Graves, Robert

39.

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

40.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Stedman, Captain J. G.

41.

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.)

42.

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

Field, Eugene

43.

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

44.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

45.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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

47.

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

Dickinson, Emily

48.

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

Hardy, Thomas

49.

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

Horace

50.

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