Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

Aristotle

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Chandler, Raymond

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

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

Hardy, Thomas

10.

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

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.

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

13.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

14.

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

15.

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

Field, Eugene

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Diderot, Denis

18.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

19.

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

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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

Dickinson, Emily

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Bodenheim, Maxwell

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

33.

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''

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

40.

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

41.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

44.

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

Graves, Robert

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

47.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

48.

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

Barrymore, John

49.

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

50.

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

Voltaire