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

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

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Auden, W. H.

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''

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Chandler, Raymond

10.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

11.

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

Dickinson, Emily

12.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

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.

14.

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

Joyce, James

15.

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

Graves, Robert

16.

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

Field, Eugene

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

Morley, Christopher

19.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

21.

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.

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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.

28.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

29.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

30.

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.

31.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

34.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

35.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

36.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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.

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

42.

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

Woolf, Virginia

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

45.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Barrymore, John

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Thoreau, Henry David