Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

Sandburg, Carl

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Horace

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

10.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Engle, Paul

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Hare, David

21.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

25.

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.)

26.

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.

27.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

29.

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

Frost, Robert

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Hardy, Thomas

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

34.

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.

35.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

36.

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.

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

Plath, Sylvia

39.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

42.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

50.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl