Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Frost, Robert

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Horace

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

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

19.

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

Frost, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

Horace

23.

Cocteau, Jean

24.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

25.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

26.

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.

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

Plath, Sylvia

33.

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

Dickinson, Emily

34.

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

Diderot, Denis

35.

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.

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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

Graves, Robert

38.

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

39.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

44.

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

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

46.

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

Fowles, John

47.

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

48.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

49.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

50.

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