Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Renard, Jules

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Frost, Robert

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.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Frost, Robert

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

Marquis, Don

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

Barrymore, John

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

13.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

14.

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

Chandler, Raymond

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Eliot, T. S.

17.

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

18.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

19.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

24.

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

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

27.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

28.

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

29.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

30.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

31.

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

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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.

39.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

40.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

41.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Morley, Christopher

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

Aristotle

48.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

49.

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.)

50.

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

Graves, Robert