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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

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

Fowles, John

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

Aristotle

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

Horace

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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.

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.

13.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

14.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

18.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

19.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

20.

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''

21.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

Morley, Christopher

24.

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

25.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Plath, Sylvia

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

30.

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.

31.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

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

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

38.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

39.

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

Hare, David

40.

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

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.

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

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Dickinson, Emily

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

48.

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

Ashbery, John

49.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

50.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.