Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Horace

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Frost, Robert

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

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

Engle, Paul

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

10.

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

11.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

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

Ackerman, Diane

15.

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.

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Temple, Sir William

19.

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

Ashbery, John

20.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

21.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

22.

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

Hare, David

23.

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

24.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

27.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

28.

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.

29.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

30.

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

Joubert, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Cocteau, Jean

34.

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

35.

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

Marquis, Don

36.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

37.

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.)

38.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

39.

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''

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.