Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Joyce, James

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Sandburg, Carl

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Frost, Robert

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

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

Dickinson, Emily

27.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

28.

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

Ackerman, Diane

29.

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

30.

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

Morley, Christopher

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Hare, David

35.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

36.

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

37.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

38.

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

Marquis, Don

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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

Auden, W. H.

41.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

42.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

44.

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

Eliot, T. S.

45.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

46.

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

47.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

48.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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.)