Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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''

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Engle, Paul

12.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

13.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

Dickinson, Emily

15.

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

Chandler, Raymond

16.

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

17.

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

Fowles, John

18.

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.

19.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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

Joubert, Joseph

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

24.

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

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

27.

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

28.

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

Hare, David

29.

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.)

30.

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

Barrymore, John

31.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

32.

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

Temple, Sir William

33.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

34.

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

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Horace

38.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

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

41.

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

Marquis, Don

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

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

Woolf, Virginia

44.

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

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 poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

47.

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

48.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

49.

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

Eco, Umberto

50.

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

Ashbery, John