Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fowles, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Frost, Robert

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

Horace

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Joyce, James

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

Scott, Sir Walter

10.

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.

11.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

12.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

13.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

14.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

20.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

Field, Eugene

23.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

26.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

27.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Hare, David

36.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

Temple, Sir William

41.

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

42.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

44.

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

Eliot, T. S.

45.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

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