Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

Temple, Sir William

16.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

17.

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

18.

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

Plath, Sylvia

19.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

20.

Fry, Christopher

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

23.

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.

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

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

28.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

Marquis, Don

36.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

37.

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

Ackerman, Diane

38.

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

Hardy, Thomas

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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

Fowles, John

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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.

45.

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

Diderot, Denis

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

49.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

50.

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

Horace