Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Marquis, Don

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

Plath, Sylvia

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

10.

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

11.

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

Auden, W. H.

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

14.

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.

15.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

16.

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.

17.

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

Ashbery, John

18.

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

Temple, Sir William

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

21.

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

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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.

28.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

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

Dickinson, Emily

32.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

33.

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

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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

36.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

37.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

Chandler, Raymond

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

41.

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.

42.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

43.

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.

44.

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

Renard, Jules

45.

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

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

48.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

50.

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