Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Horace

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Renard, Jules

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

17.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

18.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

19.

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

Dickinson, Emily

20.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

White, Elwyn Brooks

24.

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

Temple, Sir William

25.

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

Morley, Christopher

26.

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

Aristotle

27.

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

Horace

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

32.

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

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

34.

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

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

Ackerman, Diane

37.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

38.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

39.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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''

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

48.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

49.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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