Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Aristotle

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

Morley, Christopher

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

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

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

Fowles, John

11.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Renard, Jules

15.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

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

Plath, Sylvia

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

20.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

21.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

22.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

23.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Ackerman, Diane

31.

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

Engle, Paul

32.

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

33.

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

Eliot, T. S.

34.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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

37.

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

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.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

40.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Voltaire

42.

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

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

49.

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.

50.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.