Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Joubert, Joseph

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

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

Sandburg, Carl

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

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

Ackerman, Diane

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

10.

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

11.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

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

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

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

18.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Chandler, Raymond

26.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Hardy, Thomas

27.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

28.

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

Dickinson, Emily

29.

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.

30.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

34.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

35.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

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

Ashbery, John

38.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

42.

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

43.

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

Morley, Christopher

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

49.

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''

50.

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

Horace