Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about 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

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.

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

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

Fowles, John

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

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

10.

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

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.

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.

13.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Chandler, Raymond

15.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Barrymore, John

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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.)

25.

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

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

30.

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

Horace

31.

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

32.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

33.

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

34.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

37.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

Graves, Robert

40.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

48.

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

49.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

50.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith