Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

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Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Chandler, Raymond

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.

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

Joubert, Joseph

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Horace

10.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

11.

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

Sandburg, Carl

12.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

13.

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

14.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

17.

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

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

20.

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.)

21.

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

Graves, Robert

22.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Barrymore, John

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

Temple, Sir William

36.

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

Aristotle

37.

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

Morley, Christopher

38.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

39.

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

Engle, Paul

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Marquis, Don

44.

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''

45.

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.

46.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.