Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Field, Eugene

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

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

Horace

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Joyce, James

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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

13.

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

Fowles, John

14.

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

15.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

16.

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

17.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Hare, David

22.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

23.

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

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

29.

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.

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

32.

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

Hardy, Thomas

33.

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

34.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

35.

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.

36.

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

Barrymore, John

37.

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

Chandler, Raymond

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

40.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

41.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

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

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

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

47.

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''

48.

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

Graves, Robert

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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