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 wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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.

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

Barrymore, John

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

Horace

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

Graves, Robert

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

Voltaire

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

Hare, David

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.

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

Frost, Robert

10.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

12.

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

13.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

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

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

Plath, Sylvia

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

20.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

21.

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

Ashbery, John

22.

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

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

25.

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

Dickinson, Emily

26.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

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

Temple, Sir William

29.

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

Engle, Paul

30.

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.

31.

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

Horace

32.

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.

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

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.

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

Diderot, Denis

42.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

43.

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

44.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Aristotle

48.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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.