Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Ackerman, Diane

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Voltaire

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Ackerman, Diane

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

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

Aristotle

10.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Engle, Paul

14.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Horace

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

20.

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.

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Temple, Sir William

24.

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

Horace

25.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

26.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

29.

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

30.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

31.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

32.

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

Diderot, Denis

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Frost, Robert

36.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

37.

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

Ashbery, John

38.

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

39.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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.

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

Horace

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Plath, Sylvia

46.

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

47.

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''

48.

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

Hare, David

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Voltaire