Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poets are born, not paid.

- Mizner, Addison

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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.

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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Engle, Paul

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

Horace

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

23.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

24.

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.

25.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

30.

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

Temple, Sir William

31.

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.

32.

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

Barrymore, John

33.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

34.

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

Morley, Christopher

35.

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

Hardy, Thomas

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

40.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

42.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

45.

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

Ashbery, John

46.

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

Dickinson, Emily

47.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

48.

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

Fowles, John

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo