Motivational Quotes

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Hare, David

The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Morley, Christopher

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Flaubert, Gustave

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

10.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

11.

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

Dickinson, Emily

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

16.

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

Engle, Paul

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

20.

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

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

Barrymore, John

22.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

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

Horace

27.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Chandler, Raymond

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

34.

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

35.

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

Sandburg, Carl

36.

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

37.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

38.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

39.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

40.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

42.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

43.

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

44.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

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

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

49.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

50.

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