Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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 the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Fowles, John

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

10.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

11.

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.

12.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

13.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

14.

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

Joyce, James

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

18.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

19.

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.

20.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Field, Eugene

23.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

24.

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

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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

Diderot, Denis

29.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Horace

31.

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

Ackerman, Diane

32.

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

33.

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

Joubert, Joseph

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

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

Horace

36.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

37.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

38.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

41.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

42.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

43.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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

Morley, Christopher

46.

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

47.

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

48.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

50.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.