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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

Horace

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

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

11.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

12.

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Engle, Paul

17.

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.)

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

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.

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

22.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

26.

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

Barrymore, John

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

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

Joyce, James

29.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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''

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

35.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

37.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Joubert, Joseph

41.

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

Hare, David

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

45.

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.

46.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

47.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.