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

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.

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Frost, Robert

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Flaubert, Gustave

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

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

10.

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

Engle, Paul

11.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

14.

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

Chandler, Raymond

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

17.

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

18.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Cocteau, Jean

20.

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.

21.

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

Graves, Robert

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

Plath, Sylvia

24.

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

25.

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

Ashbery, John

26.

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

Morley, Christopher

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

35.

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

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

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

Ackerman, Diane

38.

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

39.

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''

40.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

44.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

47.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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.