Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Morley, Christopher

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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 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

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

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

Horace

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.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

10.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

Hare, David

12.

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

Dickinson, Emily

13.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

16.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

19.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

20.

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

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Ashbery, John

29.

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

30.

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

Hardy, Thomas

31.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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.

36.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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.

39.

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

Renard, Jules

40.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

44.

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.)

45.

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

46.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

47.

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''

48.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George