Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Hare, David

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

10.

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

Graves, Robert

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Diderot, Denis

13.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

14.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

15.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

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

Cocteau, Jean

20.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

21.

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

Engle, Paul

22.

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

Marquis, Don

23.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

28.

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

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Ashbery, John

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Morley, Christopher

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

42.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

47.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

48.

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.

49.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

50.

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

Sandburg, Carl