Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poets wish to profit or to please.

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Voltaire

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

Fowles, John

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

10.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

11.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

18.

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

Chandler, Raymond

19.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

20.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

Frost, Robert

29.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

30.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

31.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

32.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

33.

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

34.

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

Eliot, T. S.

35.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

36.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

37.

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