Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Horace

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Morley, Christopher

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

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

Scott, Sir Walter

Dylan, Bob

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.

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

13.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

18.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Hare, David

26.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

31.

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

32.

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

Renard, Jules

33.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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

Ackerman, Diane

37.

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

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.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

40.

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

Hardy, Thomas

41.

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

Plath, Sylvia

42.

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

43.

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

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia

45.

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.

46.

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

Joubert, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

50.

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.