Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Aristotle

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''

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Marquis, Don

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

Field, Eugene

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Barrymore, John

20.

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

Fowles, John

21.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

22.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

23.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

24.

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

Eliot, T. S.

25.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

26.

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

Ackerman, Diane

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

Ashbery, John

31.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

32.

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

Renard, Jules

33.

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

34.

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

Hare, David

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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.

41.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Morley, Christopher

45.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

46.

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

47.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

48.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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

Diderot, Denis

50.

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

Frost, Robert