Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Ashbery, John

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

10.

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

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Plath, Sylvia

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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.)

16.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

18.

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

19.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Joyce, James

22.

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.

23.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

24.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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

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.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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

Field, Eugene

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

Diderot, Denis

38.

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

39.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

42.

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

Ackerman, Diane

43.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Fowles, John

47.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

48.

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

49.

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