Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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.)

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Frye, Northrop

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Renard, Jules

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

10.

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

Hare, David

11.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

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

13.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

18.

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

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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.

24.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

25.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

26.

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

Ackerman, Diane

27.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Marquis, Don

32.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

Chandler, Raymond

38.

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

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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.

42.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

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

45.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

48.

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