Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Engle, Paul

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Horace

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

Renard, Jules

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

15.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

25.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Barrymore, John

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

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

29.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

30.

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

Plath, Sylvia

31.

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.

32.

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

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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

34.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

35.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Artaud, Antonin

36.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

39.

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

40.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

41.

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

Morley, Christopher

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

44.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

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

Graves, Robert