Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Cocteau, Jean

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 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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Horace

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Voltaire

10.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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

12.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

13.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

17.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

26.

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

Plath, Sylvia

27.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

28.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

29.

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

30.

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''

31.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

33.

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

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

36.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

37.

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.

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

49.

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

Diderot, Denis

50.

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