Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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, 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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

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 the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

10.

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

11.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

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

Chandler, Raymond

13.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Hare, David

14.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

15.

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

Morley, Christopher

16.

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

Barrymore, John

17.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

18.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

Horace

21.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

Marquis, Don

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.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

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

28.

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

Ackerman, Diane

29.

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

30.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

32.

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

Plath, Sylvia

33.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

35.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

Engle, Paul

37.

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

Field, Eugene

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

Temple, Sir William

42.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

43.

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

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

Joubert, Joseph

48.

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.

49.

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

Fowles, John

50.

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.)