Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Horace

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

Voltaire

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Aristotle

10.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

11.

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.)

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

14.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

Woolf, Virginia

17.

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

18.

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

22.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

23.

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

Morley, Christopher

24.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

27.

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''

28.

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

29.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

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

Field, Eugene

32.

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.

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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.

38.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

Ashbery, John

45.

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

Joyce, James

46.

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