Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

Field, Eugene

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

Horace

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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.

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

Fowles, John

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

Horace

10.

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

Hardy, Thomas

11.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

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

Temple, Sir William

13.

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

Aristotle

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

16.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

18.

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

19.

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

Morley, Christopher

20.

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

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Hare, David

24.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

25.

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

26.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

30.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

31.

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

Engle, Paul

32.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

39.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Barrymore, John

41.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Horace

46.

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

Marquis, Don

47.

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