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

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

Fowles, John

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

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.)

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Hardy, Thomas

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Engle, Paul

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

10.

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

Horace

11.

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''

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

14.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

18.

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.

19.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Temple, Sir William

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

28.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

29.

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

30.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

32.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

33.

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.

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Field, Eugene

38.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Artaud, Antonin

39.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

40.

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

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

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

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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

45.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Hare, David

47.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

48.

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