Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Bodenheim, Maxwell

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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.)

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

10.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

12.

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

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

Fowles, John

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

18.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

24.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

27.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

28.

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

Horace

29.

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.

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Sandburg, Carl

32.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Morley, Christopher

35.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

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

38.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

39.

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

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

42.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

43.

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

Diderot, Denis

44.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

45.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

Hare, David

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.