Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Hardy, Thomas

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Voltaire

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Field, Eugene

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

22.

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

23.

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

Barrymore, John

24.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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.

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

Voltaire

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

Plath, Sylvia

34.

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

Dickinson, Emily

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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.

37.

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

Hare, David

38.

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

39.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

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

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.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

47.

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

Aristotle