Poetry Quotes by Umberto Eco

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

— Umberto Eco

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

— Umberto Eco

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

— Umberto Eco

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

— Umberto Eco

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

— Umberto Eco

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

— Umberto Eco

“Poetry… it consumed Sappho’s young years, it nourished Goethe’s old age. Drug, the Greeks called it, both poison and medicine.”

— Umberto Eco

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

— Umberto Eco

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit…

— Umberto Eco

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being…

— Umberto Eco

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

— Umberto Eco

“And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion.”

— Umberto Eco

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that…

— Umberto Eco

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point…

— Umberto Eco

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with…

— Umberto Eco

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn…

— Umberto Eco

You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal…

— Umberto Eco

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position…

— Umberto Eco

“It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely. In poetry the constraint can be imposed by meter, foot, rhyme,…

— Umberto Eco