Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Aristotle

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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 achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Marquis, Don

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Ashbery, John

16.

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

17.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

18.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

19.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

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

Chandler, Raymond

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Hardy, Thomas

28.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

Graves, Robert

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

36.

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

37.

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

Fowles, John

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Temple, Sir William

44.

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

Horace

45.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

46.

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.

47.

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

Horace

48.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

49.

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

50.

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