Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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 impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Voltaire

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Engle, Paul

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Renard, Jules

13.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

14.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Ashbery, John

20.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

21.

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

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

24.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

25.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

26.

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

Diderot, Denis

27.

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

Field, Eugene

28.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

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

Hardy, Thomas

33.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

34.

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

35.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

39.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Barrymore, John

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

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

Horace

43.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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.)

47.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

48.

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

49.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

50.

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