Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

11.

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.)

12.

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

Hare, David

13.

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

Ackerman, Diane

14.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

20.

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.

21.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

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

Joubert, Joseph

26.

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

Ashbery, John

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

31.

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

32.

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

Barrymore, John

33.

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.

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

40.

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

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

43.

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

Renard, Jules

44.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

45.

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

Aristotle

46.

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.

47.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Graves, Robert

49.

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''

50.

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

Horace