Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

- Marquis, Don

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

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

Horace

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.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

10.

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

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

12.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Hare, David

13.

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

Dickinson, Emily

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

18.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

24.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

25.

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

Sandburg, Carl

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

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.

31.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

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

Marquis, Don

36.

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

37.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

38.

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

Engle, Paul

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

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.

41.

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

Morley, Christopher

42.

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

Graves, Robert

43.

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

Horace

44.

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