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

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.

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Ashbery, John

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Ackerman, Diane

12.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Chandler, Raymond

16.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

18.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

19.

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

Hardy, Thomas

20.

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.)

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

23.

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

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Renard, Jules

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

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

32.

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

Field, Eugene

33.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

34.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

Dickinson, Emily

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

40.

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.

41.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

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

Engle, Paul

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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.

46.

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

Marquis, Don

47.

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.

48.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

49.

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''

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.