Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.)

Best Quotes about 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

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''

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Eliot, T. S.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Aristotle

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

Fowles, John

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

Hare, David

10.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

12.

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

13.

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

Aristotle

14.

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

Barrymore, John

15.

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

Morley, Christopher

16.

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

17.

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

Ackerman, Diane

18.

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.

19.

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.

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

29.

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

Frost, Robert

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

35.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

38.

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.

39.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

40.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

41.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

42.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.