Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Engle, Paul

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Aristotle

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Morley, Christopher

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

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

Engle, Paul

12.

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

13.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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

16.

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''

17.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

18.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

20.

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

Renard, Jules

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Joyce, James

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 is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

28.

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

Frost, Robert

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

31.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Stedman, Captain J. G.

32.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

33.

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

Fowles, John

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

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

43.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Voltaire

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

49.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

50.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David