Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

Horace

15.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

16.

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

Ackerman, Diane

17.

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.

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

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

Barrymore, John

22.

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

Hardy, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Morley, Christopher

25.

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

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.

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

Horace

29.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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.)

33.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

34.

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.

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

39.

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.

40.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

41.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

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

44.

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

Plath, Sylvia

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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

50.

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