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

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Voltaire

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

Aristotle

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

11.

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.

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Engle, Paul

14.

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

Field, Eugene

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.

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

Horace

17.

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

Plath, Sylvia

18.

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

Frost, Robert

19.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

20.

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

Ashbery, John

21.

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

22.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

23.

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

Temple, Sir William

24.

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

25.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

26.

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

Fowles, John

27.

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.

28.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

29.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

34.

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

Barrymore, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Hardy, Thomas

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

Graves, Robert

42.

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''

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

Sandburg, Carl

45.

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.

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

Chandler, Raymond

48.

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

Diderot, Denis

49.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

50.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Ginsberg, Allen