Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Engle, Paul

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

Aristotle

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

Graves, Robert

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

10.

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

Hardy, Thomas

11.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

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

Aristotle

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

15.

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

Temple, Sir William

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

Renard, Jules

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

24.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Horace

29.

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

30.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

31.

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

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

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

Eliot, T. S.

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

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.

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

38.

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.)

39.

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

Fowles, John

40.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Field, Eugene

42.

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

Ackerman, Diane

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

48.

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.

49.

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

Diderot, Denis

50.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.