Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Scott, Sir Walter

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Hare, David

15.

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

Ashbery, John

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

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.

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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''

20.

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

21.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

25.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

31.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

35.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

36.

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

Hardy, Thomas

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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

Horace

42.

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

43.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

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

Diderot, Denis

47.

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

48.

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

Renard, Jules

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Fowles, John