Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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.

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

Voltaire

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Fitzhugh, C.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

13.

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

14.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

Plath, Sylvia

17.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

18.

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

19.

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

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.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

Dickinson, Emily

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Morley, Christopher

27.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

28.

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

Ashbery, John

29.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

30.

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

Temple, Sir William

31.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

34.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

35.

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

36.

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

Joyce, James

37.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

38.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

Horace

40.

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.)

41.

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

42.

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

Field, Eugene

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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.

45.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

46.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

47.

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

Fowles, John

48.

Poetry is life distilled.