Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Joyce, James

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Renard, Jules

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

Fowles, John

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

10.

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

11.

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

Field, Eugene

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

14.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

15.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

16.

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

Hardy, Thomas

17.

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.)

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Barrymore, John

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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

Plath, Sylvia

29.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

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

Temple, Sir William

38.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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''

46.

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

Cocteau, Jean

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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