Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

Horace

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

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

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

Horace

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

Field, Eugene

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

Ackerman, Diane

12.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

Chandler, Raymond

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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.)

21.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

27.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

32.

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

Plath, Sylvia

33.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

38.

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.

39.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

40.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

Cocteau, Jean

48.

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