Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

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 an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Aristotle

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Fowles, John

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

10.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

11.

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.

12.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

13.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Eliot, T. S.

16.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

17.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

18.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

20.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

21.

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

22.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

Hardy, Thomas

30.

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.)

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Dickinson, Emily

33.

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

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.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

36.

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.

37.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

Frost, Robert

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Marquis, Don

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

49.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

50.

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

Renard, Jules