Quotes on Poets/Poetry

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." -Soren Kierkegaard

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. -John Cage

I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the readers. -Mark Twain

You can't write poetry on the computer. -Quentin Tarantino

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 who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. -T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. -Robert Frost, 1935

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. -W.H. Auden

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. -W. Somerset Maugham

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. -Jean Cocteau

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. -Salman Rushdie

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. -Novalis

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. -Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered


Ha! Some of that's such crap.