Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Engle, Paul

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Frost, Robert

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''

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

Graves, Robert

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.

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

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

Barrymore, John

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Morley, Christopher

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

18.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

19.

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

20.

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.)

21.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

22.

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

Temple, Sir William

23.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

24.

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

25.

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

Hare, David

26.

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

Ackerman, Diane

27.

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

28.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Hardy, Thomas

34.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

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

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.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

40.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

41.

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

Ashbery, John

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

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

Horace

46.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

47.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

48.

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

Joyce, James

49.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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