Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Barrymore, John

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Ashbery, John

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

Frost, Robert

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Marquis, Don

15.

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.

16.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

19.

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

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

Joubert, Joseph

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

28.

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

Morley, Christopher

29.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

32.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

33.

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

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

36.

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

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Woolf, Virginia