Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

10.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

11.

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''

12.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

13.

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

Horace

14.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

15.

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

Marquis, Don

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Horace

25.

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

Graves, Robert

26.

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

27.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

28.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

Aristotle

31.

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.

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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.

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

36.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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

Joyce, James

39.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

43.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Chandler, Raymond

45.

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

46.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

47.

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

48.

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

Fowles, John

49.

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

50.

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

Temple, Sir William