Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Plath, Sylvia

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Ashbery, John

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Hardy, Thomas

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

10.

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

11.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

12.

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.

13.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

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

Joyce, James

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

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

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

22.

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.

23.

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

Horace

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Morley, Christopher

27.

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.

28.

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.)

29.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

30.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

34.

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''

35.

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

36.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

40.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

41.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

42.

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

Engle, Paul

43.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

44.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

45.

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

46.

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

Fowles, John

47.

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

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

Aristotle