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

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

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

Horace

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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.

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

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

14.

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

15.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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.

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Voltaire

21.

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

22.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

23.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

24.

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

Hare, David

25.

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

26.

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

Engle, Paul

27.

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

28.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

30.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

31.

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.

32.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

33.

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

34.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

37.

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

Aristotle

38.

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

39.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

Barrymore, John

42.

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

43.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

44.

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

45.

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

Diderot, Denis

46.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

48.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.