Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Renard, Jules

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Marquis, Don

10.

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

Graves, Robert

11.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Hare, David

15.

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

Dickinson, Emily

16.

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

17.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

18.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

19.

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

20.

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

Chandler, Raymond

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

Barrymore, John

25.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

26.

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

Fowles, John

27.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

31.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

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

Renard, Jules

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

38.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Ashbery, John

41.

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

Sandburg, Carl

42.

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

Plath, Sylvia

43.

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.

44.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

45.

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

46.

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

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

Engle, Paul

48.

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

49.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

50.

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.