Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Rilke, Rainer Maria

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Chandler, Raymond

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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.

10.

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

11.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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.

18.

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

Graves, Robert

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 an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

21.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

25.

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

Ackerman, Diane

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

29.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

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.

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

35.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

39.

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.

40.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

41.

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

Marquis, Don

42.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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.

44.

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

Field, Eugene

45.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

46.

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

Joubert, Joseph

47.

Every old poem is sacred.