Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

- Roux, Joseph

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Woolf, Virginia

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''

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Field, Eugene

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Diderot, Denis

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Temple, Sir William

11.

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

Ackerman, Diane

12.

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

Horace

13.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

14.

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

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

17.

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

Barrymore, John

18.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

21.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Eliot, T. S.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

29.

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

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

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

32.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

Engle, Paul

35.

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

Hare, David

36.

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

Hardy, Thomas

37.

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

Voltaire

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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.

40.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

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

Joyce, James

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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.

44.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

45.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Aristotle

49.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

50.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert