Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Woolf, Virginia

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Auden, W. H.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Field, Eugene

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

Renard, Jules

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

15.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

16.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

17.

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

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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.

19.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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.)

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

26.

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

Dickinson, Emily

27.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

28.

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

29.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

30.

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

Horace

31.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

Hardy, Thomas

35.

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

Plath, Sylvia

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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

Morley, Christopher

45.

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

Aristotle

46.

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

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

48.

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

Joubert, Joseph

49.

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.

50.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell