Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Frost, Robert

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

14.

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

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

16.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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.

22.

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

Field, Eugene

23.

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

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

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

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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

Barrymore, John

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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''

32.

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.

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

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

36.

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

Horace

37.

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.

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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.

40.

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

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

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

43.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar