Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Hare, David

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

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Field, Eugene

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

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.

12.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

16.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

17.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

20.

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

Dickinson, Emily

21.

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

Barrymore, John

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

24.

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

Morley, Christopher

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

28.

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.

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

33.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

34.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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 what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

37.

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''

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

40.

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

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

43.

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

Joyce, James

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.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

49.

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

50.

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