Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

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.

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

Plath, Sylvia

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Field, Eugene

10.

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

13.

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

Hardy, Thomas

14.

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

Marquis, Don

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

19.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Fowles, John

29.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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.

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

41.

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

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Engle, Paul

44.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

45.

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

46.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell