Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

- Farquhar, George

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Sandburg, Carl

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

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

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

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

Horace

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Hardy, Thomas

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.

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.

11.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

12.

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

Plath, Sylvia

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

15.

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

Horace

16.

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.

17.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

19.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

23.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

24.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

25.

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

26.

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

Aristotle

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Renard, Jules

32.

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

33.

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

Barrymore, John

34.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

35.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

Joyce, James

38.

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.

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

45.

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

Hare, David

46.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell