Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

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

Joyce, James

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

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

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

12.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

15.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

16.

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

17.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

18.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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

Joubert, Joseph

24.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

28.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Field, Eugene

32.

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.

33.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

39.

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

Renard, Jules

40.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

41.

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

42.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

44.

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

45.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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

50.

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