Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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.

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

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

Hare, David

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

10.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

13.

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

14.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

15.

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

Field, Eugene

16.

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

Fowles, John

17.

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

18.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

Ashbery, John

21.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

22.

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

23.

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

Morley, Christopher

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Horace

28.

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

Joyce, James

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Barrymore, John

32.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

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

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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.)

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

39.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

42.

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

Renard, Jules

43.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

44.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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.