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

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

Engle, Paul

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

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

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Frost, Robert

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

Voltaire

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

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 man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

13.

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

14.

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

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

21.

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

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

23.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Horace

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

Barrymore, John

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

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

Fowles, John

33.

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

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

38.

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

39.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

46.

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

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

Hare, David

49.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

50.

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