Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

- Roux, Joseph

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Aristotle

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

10.

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

11.

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

Morley, Christopher

12.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

13.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

Fowles, John

16.

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

17.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

18.

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

Engle, Paul

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Dickinson, Emily

22.

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

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

25.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

26.

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''

27.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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 at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

47.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

48.

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

Ashbery, John

49.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.