Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Engle, Paul

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Frost, Robert

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Marquis, Don

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

Horace

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

Renard, Jules

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

10.

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

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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

Barrymore, John

12.

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

Morley, Christopher

13.

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

Graves, Robert

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

16.

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

Dickinson, Emily

17.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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.)

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

30.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

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.

35.

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

Joyce, James

36.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

37.

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

Ackerman, Diane

38.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

39.

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

Plath, Sylvia

40.

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

41.

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

Aristotle

42.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

43.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

44.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Horace

49.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

50.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar