Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

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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

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

12.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

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

Cocteau, Jean

14.

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

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

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.

17.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

21.

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

22.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

23.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

Horace

27.

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.)

28.

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

Chandler, Raymond

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

31.

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

Engle, Paul

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

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

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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''

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

41.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Ackerman, Diane

45.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

50.

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

Renard, Jules