Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Ackerman, Diane

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''

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

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

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

Horace

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.

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

Renard, Jules

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

Fowles, John

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

Barrymore, John

10.

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

Joubert, Joseph

11.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

17.

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.

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Morley, Christopher

20.

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.

21.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

23.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

24.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

35.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

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.)

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Hardy, Thomas

41.

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

Graves, Robert

42.

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

Diderot, Denis

43.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

44.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Woolf, Virginia

49.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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