Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Graves, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

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

Renard, Jules

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Joyce, James

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Woolf, Virginia

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

13.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

19.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

20.

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

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

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

Hare, David

26.

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

Field, Eugene

27.

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

28.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

32.

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

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Frost, Robert

36.

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

Engle, Paul

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Plath, Sylvia

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

42.

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

Barrymore, John

43.

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.

44.

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

Sandburg, Carl

45.

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

46.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

47.

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

48.

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

Horace

49.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

50.

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

Scott, Sir Walter