Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Temple, Sir William

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

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

Chandler, Raymond

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Sandburg, Carl

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Hare, David

10.

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

Graves, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

13.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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.

19.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

26.

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

27.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Hardy, Thomas

29.

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''

30.

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

31.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Barrymore, John

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

40.

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.

41.

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.

42.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

43.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

44.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

White, Elwyn Brooks

48.

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

49.

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

Morley, Christopher

50.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord