Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fowles, John

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Aristotle

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.

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.

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

Frost, Robert

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

Engle, Paul

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

Voltaire

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

11.

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

12.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

18.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

19.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

20.

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

Voltaire

21.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

22.

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.

23.

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

Horace

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

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

Ashbery, John

26.

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

Horace

27.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

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

Dickinson, Emily

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

35.

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

36.

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''

37.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Joubert, Joseph

39.

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

40.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Graves, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

45.

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

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

48.

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

Hare, David

49.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.