Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

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

Diderot, Denis

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Frost, Robert

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

10.

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

11.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

12.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

15.

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

Field, Eugene

16.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

17.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Fowles, John

23.

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.

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Graves, Robert

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

33.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Barrymore, John

38.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

39.

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

40.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Hare, David

44.

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

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

50.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar