Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

- Brooks, Gwendolyn

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Fowles, John

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

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

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

Morley, Christopher

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

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

Barrymore, John

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Chandler, Raymond

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

18.

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

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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.

21.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

24.

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

25.

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

Field, Eugene

26.

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

27.

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

Ackerman, Diane

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

30.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

31.

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

32.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

Ashbery, John

36.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

37.

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

Joyce, James

38.

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

Hare, David

39.

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

Horace

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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.)

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

44.

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

45.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joubert, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

Cocteau, Jean

48.

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

49.

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''

50.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Frost, Robert