Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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''

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.)

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Frost, Robert

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

Joyce, James

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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

13.

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

Fowles, John

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

20.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

21.

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

22.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

23.

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

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

26.

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

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Dickinson, Emily

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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.

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

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

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

38.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

39.

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

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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

Diderot, Denis

44.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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

50.

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