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

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

Marquis, Don

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Hare, David

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

Horace

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

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.

11.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

12.

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

13.

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.)

14.

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

15.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

16.

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.

17.

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

Hardy, Thomas

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

19.

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

20.

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

Voltaire

21.

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

22.

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

Renard, Jules

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Diderot, Denis

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

32.

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

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

36.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

37.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Dickinson, Emily

39.

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

Voltaire

40.

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

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

43.

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

44.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

47.

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

48.

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''

49.

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

50.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace