Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Ashbery, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

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.

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.

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

Joubert, Joseph

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Eliot, T. S.

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

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

12.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

18.

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

Morley, Christopher

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

24.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

Barrymore, John

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

35.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

36.

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''

37.

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

Diderot, Denis

38.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

39.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

41.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

Ackerman, Diane

45.

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

Ashbery, John

46.

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

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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

Frost, Robert