Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Horace

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.)

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

10.

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

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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.

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

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

Horace

14.

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.

15.

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.

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Dickinson, Emily

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

Fowles, John

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

24.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

30.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

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

Graves, Robert

34.

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

Engle, Paul

35.

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

Barrymore, John

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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

39.

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

40.

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

Hardy, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

44.

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''

45.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

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

Joyce, James

49.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

50.

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