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

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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''

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

12.

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

Graves, Robert

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

Fowles, John

15.

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

16.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

17.

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

18.

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

Engle, Paul

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

21.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

22.

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

Joyce, James

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

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

Frost, Robert

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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.

31.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

33.

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

Barrymore, John

34.

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

Horace

35.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

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

Marquis, Don

37.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joubert, Joseph

38.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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.

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

49.

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

50.

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

Ashbery, John