Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Ackerman, Diane

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Horace

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

10.

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

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

13.

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

14.

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

Graves, Robert

15.

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

Renard, Jules

16.

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

Plath, Sylvia

17.

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

Hardy, Thomas

18.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

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

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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''

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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.)

28.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

29.

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

Morley, Christopher

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

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

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.

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

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

Barrymore, John

36.

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

37.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Dickinson, Emily

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

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

Eliot, T. S.

41.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

42.

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

Horace

43.

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.

44.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

45.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

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

48.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

50.

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

Sandburg, Carl