Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.)

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

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

Plath, Sylvia

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

14.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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.

17.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

18.

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.

19.

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

Field, Eugene

20.

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

Graves, Robert

21.

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.)

22.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

23.

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

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

Woolf, Virginia

25.

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

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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.

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

38.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

39.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Ginsberg, Allen

40.

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

Engle, Paul

41.

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.

42.

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

Morley, Christopher

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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.

45.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Barrymore, John

48.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

49.

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

50.

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