Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Horace

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

Field, Eugene

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

10.

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.)

11.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

12.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Hare, David

16.

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

Dickinson, Emily

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

19.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

20.

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

21.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Engle, Paul

24.

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

Marquis, Don

25.

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

Eliot, T. S.

26.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

Temple, Sir William

28.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

29.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

30.

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.

31.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Chandler, Raymond

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

Renard, Jules

39.

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

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

46.

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.

47.

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

Fowles, John

48.

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

Ackerman, Diane

49.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

50.

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