Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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

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

Plath, Sylvia

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

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

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

Joyce, James

10.

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

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Ackerman, Diane

13.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

15.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Field, Eugene

21.

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

Auden, W. H.

22.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

23.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

24.

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

Eliot, T. S.

25.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

26.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

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

28.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Landor, Walter Savage

29.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

30.

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

31.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

32.

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

Barrymore, John

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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.)

38.

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

39.

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

Horace

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

44.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

45.

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

Ashbery, John

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

49.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

50.

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