Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Hardy, Thomas

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 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

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

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

11.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

16.

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.

17.

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

Temple, Sir William

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

20.

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

Morley, Christopher

21.

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

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

24.

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

Chandler, Raymond

25.

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

26.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

27.

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

28.

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

Eliot, T. S.

29.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

33.

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.

34.

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.

35.

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''

36.

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.

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

39.

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.

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

44.

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

Diderot, Denis

45.

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

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Field, Eugene