Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sitwell, Dame Edith

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Ashbery, John

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.)

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

Fitzhugh, C.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Dickinson, Emily

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

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

Graves, Robert

12.

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

13.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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

15.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

16.

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

17.

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

Fowles, John

18.

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.

19.

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

Cocteau, Jean

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

27.

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

28.

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

29.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

35.

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''

36.

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

Diderot, Denis

37.

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

Hare, David

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

40.

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.

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.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Renard, Jules

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Field, Eugene

48.

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

Plath, Sylvia

49.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

50.

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