Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

- Stevens, Wallace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Joyce, James

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

Barrymore, John

10.

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

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

18.

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.

19.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

22.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

23.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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.

25.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

26.

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

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

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

Horace

29.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

30.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

31.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

32.

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

Engle, Paul

33.

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

Marquis, Don

34.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

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

Ashbery, John

36.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

38.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Morley, Christopher

41.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

42.

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.

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

45.

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.

46.

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

Renard, Jules

47.

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''

48.

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

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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

Field, Eugene

50.

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

Scott, Sir Walter