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

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Joyce, James

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

10.

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

Ashbery, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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.

21.

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.

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

24.

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

Hare, David

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.

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

Field, Eugene

27.

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

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

Barrymore, John

33.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

34.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

35.

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.

36.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

37.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

38.

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

39.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

45.

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

Horace

46.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

47.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

48.

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''

49.

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.

50.

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

Morley, Christopher