Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Barrymore, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

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

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 poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Voltaire

10.

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

Hardy, Thomas

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Hare, David

13.

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

14.

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

Aristotle

15.

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

Ashbery, John

16.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

27.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

28.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

33.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

34.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

38.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

39.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Landor, Walter Savage

43.

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.

44.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

46.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

47.

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

Morley, Christopher

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

Horace

50.

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