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

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

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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.

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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Morley, Christopher

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

12.

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

Plath, Sylvia

13.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

14.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

17.

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

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

Ashbery, John

27.

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

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

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

Dickinson, Emily

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

34.

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

Chandler, Raymond

35.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

36.

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

37.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

38.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Horace

42.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

46.

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''

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

50.

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

Engle, Paul