Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

Diderot, Denis

10.

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.

11.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

12.

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

Field, Eugene

13.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

14.

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

15.

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

Plath, Sylvia

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hare, David

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Engle, Paul

28.

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

Graves, Robert

29.

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

Renard, Jules

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

Joubert, Joseph

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

42.

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

Barrymore, John

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

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

45.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

46.

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

Ashbery, John

47.

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

Dickinson, Emily

48.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

49.

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''

50.

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