Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Woolf, Virginia

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

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

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

Horace

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Dickinson, Emily

15.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

16.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

25.

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

26.

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

Joubert, Joseph

27.

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.

28.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

Fowles, John

34.

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

35.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

36.

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.)

37.

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

Hardy, Thomas

38.

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

Hare, David

39.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Horace

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

44.

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

Horace

45.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

48.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

49.

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

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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