Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Graves, Robert

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

Horace

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

10.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

11.

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

Temple, Sir William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

15.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

16.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

18.

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

Hardy, Thomas

19.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ashbery, John

24.

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

Fowles, John

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

29.

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.

30.

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

Engle, Paul

31.

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

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Chandler, Raymond

35.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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.

41.

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

Dickinson, Emily

42.

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

Field, Eugene

43.

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

Barrymore, John

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

48.

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

Voltaire

49.

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

50.

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