Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Ackerman, Diane

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Auden, W. H.

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Engle, Paul

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

Frost, Robert

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Ashbery, John

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

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

10.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Chandler, Raymond

13.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

14.

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

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

Eliot, T. S.

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

18.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Cocteau, Jean

22.

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.

23.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Aristotle

27.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

30.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

31.

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

Field, Eugene

32.

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

Renard, Jules

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

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

35.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

36.

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

37.

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

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

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

Hardy, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

Aristotle

48.

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

Fowles, John