Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Barrymore, John

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

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

Ashbery, John

12.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

13.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

14.

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

Plath, Sylvia

15.

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.

16.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

17.

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

Horace

18.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

19.

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

Horace

20.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Morley, Christopher

25.

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

Fowles, John

26.

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

27.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

28.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

29.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Field, Eugene

38.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

42.

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''

43.

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

44.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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