Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Diderot, Denis

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

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

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

Horace

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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

Ashbery, John

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

15.

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

Graves, Robert

16.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Fowles, John

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

22.

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

Hardy, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

Barrymore, John

26.

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

Dickinson, Emily

27.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

Ackerman, Diane

35.

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

Frost, Robert

36.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

39.

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.

40.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

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

43.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

46.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

47.

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

Field, Eugene

48.

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

49.

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

Joyce, James

50.

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

Joubert, Joseph