Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Joyce, James

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Cocteau, Jean

11.

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

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Hardy, Thomas

13.

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

Chandler, Raymond

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

Horace

24.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

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

Eliot, T. S.

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.

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

Field, Eugene

28.

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

29.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

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

Ashbery, John

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

39.

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

40.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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

44.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

45.

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

Joubert, Joseph

46.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

47.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Plath, Sylvia

49.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

50.

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.