Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Marquis, Don

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Ashbery, John

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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.

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.

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 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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

13.

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

Field, Eugene

14.

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''

15.

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

16.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

19.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

20.

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

Temple, Sir William

21.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

22.

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

23.

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

Frost, Robert

24.

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

25.

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

Engle, Paul

26.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

29.

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.

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

34.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

35.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Diderot, Denis

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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