Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Voltaire

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

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

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

10.

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.

11.

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

Diderot, Denis

12.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Barrymore, John

15.

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

16.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

Graves, Robert

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Morley, Christopher

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

Plath, Sylvia

27.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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.

31.

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

Field, Eugene

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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.

38.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

39.

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

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Ackerman, Diane

42.

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

Frost, Robert

43.

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

44.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

45.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

46.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert