Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Morley, Christopher

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Renard, Jules

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

15.

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

16.

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

Ackerman, Diane

17.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Cocteau, Jean

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

31.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

39.

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

Joyce, James

40.

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

41.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Artaud, Antonin

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

46.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

47.

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