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

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 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

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

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

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Marquis, Don

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

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

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

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

13.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

14.

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

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

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

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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''

24.

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

Ashbery, John

25.

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

26.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

27.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

28.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

29.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

32.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

33.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

34.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

35.

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.

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Joubert, Joseph

38.

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

39.

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

Fowles, John

40.

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

Renard, Jules

41.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

42.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

43.

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

Plath, Sylvia

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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.

46.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

47.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

48.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

49.

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