Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Engle, Paul

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

Ashbery, John

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Marquis, Don

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Hare, David

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

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

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Joyce, James

15.

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''

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

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.

18.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

20.

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

Dickinson, Emily

21.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

22.

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

Joubert, Joseph

23.

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.)

24.

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

Cocteau, Jean

25.

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.

26.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

27.

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

28.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

29.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

30.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

34.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

35.

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

Field, Eugene

36.

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

Fowles, John

37.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

41.

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

Graves, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.