Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Hare, David

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.

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

12.

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

Field, Eugene

13.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

14.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

19.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

20.

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

Barrymore, John

21.

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.

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Sandburg, Carl

25.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

28.

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.

29.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

30.

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

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

33.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

34.

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

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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.

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Plath, Sylvia

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

45.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

Ackerman, Diane

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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

Horace