Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

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

Barrymore, John

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

10.

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

Ashbery, John

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

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.

16.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

Marquis, Don

22.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

23.

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.

24.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

25.

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

Graves, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Joyce, James

28.

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

Hardy, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

Renard, Jules

31.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

Horace

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.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

36.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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''

41.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

44.

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

Hare, David

45.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

46.

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.)

47.

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

48.

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

Cocteau, Jean

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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