Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

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Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

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''

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Aristotle

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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.

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

Woolf, Virginia

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

10.

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.

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Renard, Jules

16.

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.

17.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

18.

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

Barrymore, John

19.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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

21.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Fowles, John

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

38.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

Joubert, Joseph

40.

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

Morley, Christopher

41.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

Temple, Sir William

49.

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