Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Aristotle

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

10.

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

Barrymore, John

11.

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

Field, Eugene

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Ashbery, John

22.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

24.

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

25.

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

Ackerman, Diane

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

28.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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

Morley, Christopher

37.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

38.

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

39.

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

Graves, Robert

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

Dickinson, Emily

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

44.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

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

Renard, Jules

46.

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

Diderot, Denis

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell