Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

- Farquhar, George

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Marquis, Don

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

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

Horace

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.)

10.

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

Barrymore, John

11.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

12.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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 at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

15.

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

Morley, Christopher

16.

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

17.

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

Hare, David

18.

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

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

21.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

22.

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

Chandler, Raymond

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Renard, Jules

27.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

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

Fowles, John

29.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

30.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Dickinson, Emily

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Field, Eugene

37.

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

38.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

Horace

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

44.

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

45.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

46.

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.

47.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don