Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Morley, Christopher

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Flaubert, Gustave

10.

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

Barrymore, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

16.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

23.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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''

28.

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

Plath, Sylvia

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

33.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

34.

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.

35.

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

Engle, Paul

36.

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

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.

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.

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

49.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

50.

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

Scott, Sir Walter