Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poets are born, not paid.

- Mizner, Addison

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Voltaire

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

Hardy, Thomas

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.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Engle, Paul

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

Horace

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

Sandburg, Carl

12.

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

Hare, David

13.

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

Morley, Christopher

14.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Fowles, John

16.

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

Plath, Sylvia

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

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

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.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

21.

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

22.

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

Dickinson, Emily

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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

26.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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.

29.

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.)

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

39.

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

40.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

42.

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

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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.

49.

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.

50.

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