Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Renard, Jules

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Engle, Paul

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Diderot, Denis

10.

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

11.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

19.

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

Frost, Robert

20.

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

Cocteau, Jean

21.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

24.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

29.

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.)

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Hardy, Thomas

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

37.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

38.

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

Sandburg, Carl

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

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

Dickinson, Emily

44.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

47.

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''

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace