Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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''

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

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.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Barrymore, John

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Ackerman, Diane

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

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.

20.

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

Ashbery, John

21.

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

22.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

23.

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

Horace

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

26.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Field, Eugene

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Engle, Paul

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

47.

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

Diderot, Denis

48.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

49.

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

Plath, Sylvia

50.

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.