Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Ashbery, John

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

Voltaire

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Morley, Christopher

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

10.

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

Dickinson, Emily

11.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

12.

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

13.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

14.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

15.

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

Ackerman, Diane

16.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

17.

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

Temple, Sir William

18.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

19.

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

20.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

21.

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

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Eliot, T. S.

25.

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

28.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

37.

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

Engle, Paul

38.

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

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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

Field, Eugene

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

44.

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

Barrymore, John

45.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Flaubert, Gustave