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

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

Hare, David

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''

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Diderot, Denis

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Frost, Robert

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

Woolf, Virginia

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

14.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

15.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

24.

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

Barrymore, John

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

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

Voltaire

27.

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

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

Horace

31.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Joubert, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

Marquis, Don

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

47.

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.

48.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

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

Voltaire