Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Morley, Christopher

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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

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

Engle, Paul

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

Renard, Jules

16.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

20.

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

Ackerman, Diane

21.

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

Joyce, James

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Marquis, Don

24.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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

Field, Eugene

26.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

27.

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

28.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

29.

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

30.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

Fowles, John

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Barrymore, John

36.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

37.

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.

38.

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

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

Ashbery, John

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

43.

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

44.

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

Hardy, Thomas

45.

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''

46.

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

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 is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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