Quotes about poetry and poets

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

Ackerman, Diane on poetry and poets
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"Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular."

Aristotle on poetry and poets
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"Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully."

Aristotle on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

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

Ashbery, John on poetry and poets   

"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. on poetry and poets   

"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. on poetry and poets
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"Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying."

Auden, W. H. on poetry and poets   

"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. on poetry and poets   

"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. on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

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

Barrymore, John on poetry and poets   

"Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections."

Baudelaire, Charles on poetry and poets   

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place."

Baudelaire, Charles on poetry and poets   

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

Baudelaire, Charles on poetry and poets   

"The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either."

Bellow, Saul on poetry and poets   

"Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind."

Bodenheim, Maxwell on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

"If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion."

Brodsky, Joseph on poetry and poets   

"Poetry is life distilled."

Brooks, Gwendolyn on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

"Poetry should only occupy the idle."

Byron, Lord on poetry and poets   

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"I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake."

Byron, Lord on poetry and poets   

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

Chandler, Raymond on poetry and poets   

"Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life."

Channing, William Ellery on poetry and poets   

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel on poetry and poets   

"Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest."

Churchill, Charles on poetry and poets   

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

Cocteau, Jean on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; --poetry = the best words in the best order."

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on poetry and poets   

"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor on poetry and poets   

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle on poetry and poets   

"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.) on poetry and poets   

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

Dickinson, Emily on poetry and poets   

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things."

Eliot, T. S. on poetry and poets
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"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."

Diderot, Denis on poetry and poets
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"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 on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets   

"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 on poetry and poets