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

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

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

Fowles, John

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

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

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Aristotle

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

16.

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

Graves, Robert

17.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

18.

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.

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

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.

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

23.

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

Ashbery, John

24.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Marquis, Don

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

31.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

39.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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.

45.

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.

46.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

47.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

48.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

49.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.