Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Dickinson, Emily

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

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 is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

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

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

Joyce, James

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

Field, Eugene

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.

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.

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

15.

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.)

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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

Barrymore, John

21.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

24.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

25.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

26.

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

Graves, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

31.

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

Hardy, Thomas

32.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Engle, Paul

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

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

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

Dickinson, Emily

41.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Diderot, Denis

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

46.

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

Morley, Christopher

47.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo