Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Engle, Paul

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

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

Horace

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

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

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

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

13.

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

Graves, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Joyce, James

16.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

17.

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

18.

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

Field, Eugene

19.

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

Horace

20.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

25.

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

Morley, Christopher

26.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

Horace

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

31.

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

32.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

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.

34.

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

Diderot, Denis

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Dickinson, Emily

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Plath, Sylvia

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

43.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

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.)

46.

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

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

48.

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

Renard, Jules

49.

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