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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Ashbery, John

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

Chandler, Raymond

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.)

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

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

Marquis, Don

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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.

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

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

Cocteau, Jean

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

17.

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.

18.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

19.

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

Frost, Robert

20.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

21.

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

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

Temple, Sir William

25.

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

26.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

27.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Barrymore, John

32.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

33.

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

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

36.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

37.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Frost, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Graves, Robert

41.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

42.

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

Frost, Robert

43.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

Hardy, Thomas

48.

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

Woolf, Virginia

49.

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.

50.

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

Aristotle