Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Rilke, Rainer Maria

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Horace

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

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

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

10.

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

11.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

12.

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

13.

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

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

15.

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

Graves, Robert

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 the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

18.

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

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

Chandler, Raymond

20.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

21.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

22.

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

Dickinson, Emily

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Ashbery, John

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Engle, Paul

30.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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.)

32.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

33.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

34.

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

35.

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

Hare, David

36.

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.

37.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joubert, Joseph

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Temple, Sir William

43.

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.

44.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

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

46.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

47.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

48.

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.

49.

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

Renard, Jules

50.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene