Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Plath, Sylvia

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Marquis, Don

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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.)

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

12.

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

Graves, Robert

13.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

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

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

25.

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

26.

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

Ashbery, John

27.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

36.

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

Horace

37.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Chandler, Raymond

39.

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

Plath, Sylvia

40.

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

41.

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

Horace

42.

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.

43.

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

Temple, Sir William

44.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

45.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

46.

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