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

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Aristotle

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Plath, Sylvia

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

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

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Ackerman, Diane

19.

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

Engle, Paul

20.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

21.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

22.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

23.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

25.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

26.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Joyce, James

35.

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

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

38.

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''

39.

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.

40.

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

Dickinson, Emily

41.

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

42.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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.

44.

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

Graves, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Hare, David

48.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

49.

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

50.

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