Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Joyce, James

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Horace

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Dickinson, Emily

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

11.

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

Auden, W. H.

12.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Renard, Jules

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

18.

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

19.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ashbery, John

24.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Frost, Robert

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

33.

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.

34.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

36.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

Joyce, James

42.

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

Hardy, Thomas

43.

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

Morley, Christopher