Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Every old poem is sacred.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.)

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Field, Eugene

10.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

16.

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

Horace

17.

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.

18.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

22.

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

Barrymore, John

23.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

Hare, David

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

28.

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''

29.

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

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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.

40.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

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

42.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

43.

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

44.

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

Cocteau, Jean

45.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.