Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

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

Voltaire

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Voltaire

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

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.

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.

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

13.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

14.

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

15.

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

Field, Eugene

16.

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

Barrymore, John

17.

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

Temple, Sir William

18.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

19.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

20.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

21.

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.

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

Joyce, James

27.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

31.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

36.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

37.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

38.

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

39.

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

Ashbery, John

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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

Hare, David

45.

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

Renard, Jules

46.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

47.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

48.

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.

49.

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

Plath, Sylvia

50.

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