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 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

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

Horace

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

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

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

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

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Joubert, Joseph

17.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

Graves, Robert

19.

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''

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

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

Frost, Robert

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Ashbery, John

30.

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.

31.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

38.

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

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

41.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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

Hare, David

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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.

47.

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.

48.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

49.

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

Field, Eugene

50.

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

Scott, Sir Walter