Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Joyce, James

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Marquis, Don

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

10.

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

Hardy, Thomas

11.

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

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Hare, David

20.

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

21.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

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

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

Horace

33.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Morley, Christopher

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

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''

39.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

40.

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

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Ashbery, John

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

45.

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

Horace

46.

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

47.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

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.)

50.

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

Barrymore, John