Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Plath, Sylvia

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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.

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 man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

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.)

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

21.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Temple, Sir William

25.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

29.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

30.

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.

31.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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.

34.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

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

Diderot, Denis

36.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

37.

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

38.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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