Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Rilke, Rainer Maria

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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.

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

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

Morley, Christopher

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

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

Temple, Sir William

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

19.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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

22.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Ginsberg, Allen

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

28.

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

Graves, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

37.

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

Ashbery, John

38.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

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

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Fowles, John

49.

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

50.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell