Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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''

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

10.

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.

11.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

14.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

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

Marquis, Don

16.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

Dickinson, Emily

18.

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

19.

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

Fowles, John

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

Joyce, James

23.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

26.

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

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Aristotle

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.

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.

31.

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

32.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

Hare, David

34.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

36.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

39.

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

Graves, Robert

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

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.

44.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

45.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

48.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

Horace

50.

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