Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Chandler, Raymond

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''

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

11.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Graves, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

Barrymore, John

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

26.

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

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

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

29.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

30.

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

Horace

31.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

32.

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.

33.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

34.

Brodsky, Joseph

35.

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

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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.

39.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

40.

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

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

Frost, Robert

43.

The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Morley, Christopher

44.

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

45.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

46.

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

Ashbery, John

47.

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

Diderot, Denis

48.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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