Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Renard, Jules

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

Voltaire

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

Dickinson, Emily

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.

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''

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

Ashbery, John

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

Marquis, Don

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

Baudelaire, Charles

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

15.

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

Engle, Paul

16.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

17.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

19.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

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

27.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

28.

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

39.

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

Graves, Robert

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.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

44.

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