Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Barrymore, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Frost, Robert

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

Hare, David

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Engle, Paul

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

Fenton, James

15.

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

16.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

17.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

Morley, Christopher

24.

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''

25.

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

Horace

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

29.

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

30.

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

Woolf, Virginia

31.

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

32.

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

Marquis, Don

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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.

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Ackerman, Diane

46.

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

47.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

48.

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

Chandler, Raymond

49.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

50.

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