Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Horace

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

Ashbery, John

13.

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

14.

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

Graves, Robert

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

Ackerman, Diane

17.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

19.

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

Morley, Christopher

20.

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

Plath, Sylvia

21.

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

Eliot, T. S.

22.

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.

23.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

24.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

25.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

26.

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.

27.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

28.

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

Barrymore, John

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.

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

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

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

Hare, David

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

Field, Eugene

47.

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

Dickinson, Emily

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Renard, Jules