Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Joyce, James

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

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

Barrymore, John

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

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.

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.

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

Horace

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

13.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

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

Ashbery, John

16.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

17.

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

Fowles, John

18.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Plath, Sylvia

22.

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

23.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

24.

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

25.

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

Renard, Jules

26.

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

Voltaire

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

29.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

31.

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

32.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

33.

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

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Engle, Paul

37.

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.)

38.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

Field, Eugene

46.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

47.

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.

48.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

49.

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

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