Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Diderot, Denis

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Fowles, John

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

10.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Field, Eugene

14.

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

Horace

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

26.

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

Graves, Robert

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Engle, Paul

30.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Marquis, Don

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

Dickinson, Emily

42.

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

Joyce, James

43.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

49.

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

Morley, Christopher

50.

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