Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Voltaire

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Engle, Paul

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

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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.

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Sandburg, Carl

10.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

20.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

21.

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

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Field, Eugene

26.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

Hare, David

28.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

29.

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

Plath, Sylvia

30.

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

31.

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

Dickinson, Emily

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

34.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

37.

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

Woolf, Virginia

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Ackerman, Diane

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Joyce, James

44.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

47.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

48.

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

Ashbery, John

49.

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Byron, Lord

50.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William