Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

- Brooks, Gwendolyn

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Renard, Jules

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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 the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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

Ashbery, John

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

Horace

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

Cocteau, Jean

10.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

11.

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

Auden, W. H.

12.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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

Hare, David

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

21.

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.

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Engle, Paul

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

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.

28.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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.

31.

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.)

32.

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

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

35.

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

Diderot, Denis

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

38.

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

Marquis, Don

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

41.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

42.

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

Joyce, James

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Fowles, John

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

49.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

50.

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