Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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.

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

Graves, Robert

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Horace

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Ashbery, John

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

19.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

20.

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

21.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

22.

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

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

Plath, Sylvia

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Voltaire

27.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

28.

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

Horace

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

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

Diderot, Denis

31.

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

Field, Eugene

32.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

33.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

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

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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

Barrymore, John

50.

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