Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

- Fitzgerald, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

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

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

Fowles, John

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

Frost, Robert

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

Renard, Jules

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

Morley, Christopher

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

12.

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

Diderot, Denis

13.

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.

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

18.

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

Field, Eugene

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

22.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Marquis, Don

27.

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''

28.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

29.

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

Barrymore, John

30.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

31.

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

Hardy, Thomas

32.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

34.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

35.

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.

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

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

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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.)

40.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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.

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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

Joyce, James

45.

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

46.

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

Graves, Robert