Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Marquis, Don

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Aristotle

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Horace

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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.

15.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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.

17.

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.

18.

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

Joyce, James

19.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

21.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

24.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

28.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

31.

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

Hare, David

32.

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

33.

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

Ashbery, John

34.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Chandler, Raymond

44.

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

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

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

47.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

48.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

49.

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

Horace

50.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.