Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Diderot, Denis

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

Joyce, James

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Marquis, Don

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

Plath, Sylvia

10.

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

11.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

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

Ackerman, Diane

14.

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

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Morley, Christopher

20.

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

Hardy, Thomas

21.

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

22.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

23.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

Joubert, Joseph

28.

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

Frost, Robert

29.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

30.

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

31.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

32.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

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

Engle, Paul

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Hare, David

37.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

38.

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.)

39.

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

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

Barrymore, John

42.

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

43.

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

Temple, Sir William

44.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

45.

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

Dickinson, Emily

46.

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

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Aristotle

49.

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.

50.

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

Baudelaire, Charles