Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

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

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

Voltaire

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Barrymore, John

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

10.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Fowles, John

12.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

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

14.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Renard, Jules

19.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

20.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

21.

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

Eliot, T. S.

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Engle, Paul

29.

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.

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

32.

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

33.

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

Ashbery, John

34.

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

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Dickinson, Emily

40.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Horace

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

44.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

45.

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

46.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

47.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

48.

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

Horace

49.

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