Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Joubert, Joseph

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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''

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

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.

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

Horace

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

Hardy, Thomas

10.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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.

13.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

14.

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

Ashbery, John

15.

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.

16.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

17.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

Hare, David

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Morley, Christopher

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Temple, Sir William

25.

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

Frost, Robert

26.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Field, Eugene

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

Aristotle

34.

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

Cocteau, Jean

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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.

37.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Sandburg, Carl

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

45.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

46.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don