Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Engle, Paul

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

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

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

Aristotle

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

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

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

10.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

11.

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

Horace

12.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

13.

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

Hardy, Thomas

14.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

15.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

16.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

17.

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

18.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

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

Field, Eugene

25.

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

Graves, Robert

26.

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.

27.

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.

28.

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.

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Cocteau, Jean

34.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

35.

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

36.

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

Horace

37.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

38.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

39.

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.

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

44.

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

Fowles, John

45.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

46.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

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

48.

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

Plath, Sylvia

49.

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

Auden, W. H.

50.

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

Hare, David