Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

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 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''

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.

10.

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

Marquis, Don

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

13.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

19.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Temple, Sir William

33.

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.

34.

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

Horace

35.

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.

36.

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

Hare, David

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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

Barrymore, John

46.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

47.

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

Chandler, Raymond

48.

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.)

49.

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

50.

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