Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Field, Eugene

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

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

Chandler, Raymond

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

17.

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

Barrymore, John

18.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Marquis, Don

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

26.

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

Plath, Sylvia

27.

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

Horace

28.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

29.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

30.

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

Fowles, John

31.

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

Temple, Sir William

32.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

33.

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

Renard, Jules

34.

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

35.

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''

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

40.

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.

41.

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

Ackerman, Diane

42.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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

45.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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

Morley, Christopher

47.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

48.

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

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell