Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Marquis, Don

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

10.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

11.

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

Barrymore, John

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

15.

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

Horace

16.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

20.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

Joubert, Joseph

22.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

23.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

26.

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

27.

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

Ashbery, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

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

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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

Frost, Robert

46.

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

Horace

47.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

48.

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

49.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

50.

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

Chandler, Raymond