Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

- Farquhar, George

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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 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

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

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

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

Hare, David

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

10.

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''

11.

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

12.

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

Marquis, Don

13.

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

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

16.

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

17.

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

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

Barrymore, John

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

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

Diderot, Denis

26.

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.

27.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

28.

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

29.

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

Ackerman, Diane

30.

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

31.

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

Morley, Christopher

32.

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.

33.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

34.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

35.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

36.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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.

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

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

Temple, Sir William

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Field, Eugene

45.

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

Joyce, James

46.

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.

47.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

48.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

49.

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

50.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison