Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

10.

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

Fowles, John

11.

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

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

14.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

15.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

16.

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

Engle, Paul

17.

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

Ackerman, Diane

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

Horace

20.

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

21.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

22.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

23.

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

Woolf, Virginia

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Barrymore, John

27.

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

28.

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

Plath, Sylvia

29.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

30.

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.

31.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

32.

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

Graves, Robert

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

36.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

Morley, Christopher

38.

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

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

42.

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

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Sandburg, Carl

45.

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

46.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

47.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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''