Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Hare, David

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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''

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

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Horace

10.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

11.

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.)

12.

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

13.

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

Ashbery, John

14.

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.

15.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

16.

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.

17.

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

Renard, Jules

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Morley, Christopher

21.

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

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

28.

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

29.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

30.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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.

32.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

33.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

36.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

45.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Plath, Sylvia

48.

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

49.

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

Marquis, Don

50.

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