Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

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

Fitzhugh, C.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Hardy, Thomas

13.

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

Diderot, Denis

14.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

15.

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

Ashbery, John

16.

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

Plath, Sylvia

17.

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

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

21.

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

22.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

24.

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

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.

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

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Temple, Sir William

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

41.

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.

42.

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.)

43.

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

44.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

45.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

46.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

49.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

50.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert