Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

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

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

Engle, Paul

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

10.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

11.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

14.

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

15.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

16.

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

17.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

19.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

20.

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

Field, Eugene

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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

23.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

25.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

26.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

27.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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.

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.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

37.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

38.

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

39.

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

Temple, Sir William

40.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Hardy, Thomas

48.

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.

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace