Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

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

Marquis, Don

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.

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Cocteau, Jean

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

12.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

13.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

14.

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

Hardy, Thomas

15.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

16.

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

Diderot, Denis

17.

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.

18.

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

Horace

19.

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.)

20.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

21.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Sandburg, Carl

26.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

27.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

29.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

30.

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

Woolf, Virginia

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Dickinson, Emily

33.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

36.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

37.

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

Voltaire

38.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

39.

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

Barrymore, John

40.

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

Horace

41.

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Field, Eugene

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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.