Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

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 exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Morley, Christopher

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

10.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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.

12.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

13.

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.)

14.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Joyce, James

18.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

19.

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

Horace

20.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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''

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

25.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

26.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

27.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

28.

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

Joubert, Joseph

29.

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

Marquis, Don

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Ackerman, Diane

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

40.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

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

Horace

42.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

43.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Frye, Northrop

44.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

47.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.