Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Horace

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

Joyce, James

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

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

Frost, Robert

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Voltaire

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

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

Horace

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

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.

20.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

21.

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''

22.

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

23.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

24.

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

Morley, Christopher

25.

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.

26.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

27.

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

28.

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

Plath, Sylvia

29.

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

Engle, Paul

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.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

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

Dickinson, Emily

33.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

Diderot, Denis

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

38.

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

Ackerman, Diane

39.

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

Ashbery, John

40.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

41.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

42.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

43.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

48.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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