Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Morley, Christopher

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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.

16.

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

Barrymore, John

17.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

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

Hardy, Thomas

20.

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

Dickinson, Emily

21.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Chandler, Raymond

28.

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

29.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

33.

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.

34.

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

Ashbery, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Horace

39.

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.)

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

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

Temple, Sir William

42.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

43.

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

44.

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

45.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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''

47.

Byron, Lord

48.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

49.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

50.

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

Engle, Paul