Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Marquis, Don

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.

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 the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Woolf, Virginia

12.

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

Renard, Jules

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

Hare, David

16.

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

Graves, Robert

17.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Joubert, Joseph

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

21.

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

Ashbery, John

22.

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.

23.

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

Aristotle

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.

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

26.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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''

32.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

33.

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.

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Barrymore, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

40.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

41.

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

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

47.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

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

Diderot, Denis

49.

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