Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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''

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

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

Plath, Sylvia

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Flaubert, Gustave

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

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.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

11.

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

12.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

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

25.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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

Diderot, Denis

28.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

29.

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

30.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

31.

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

Joubert, Joseph

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

35.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

38.

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

39.

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

Engle, Paul

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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.

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

49.

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

50.

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

Aristotle