Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Barrymore, John

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Flaubert, Gustave

10.

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

Joubert, Joseph

11.

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

Hardy, Thomas

12.

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

Ackerman, Diane

13.

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

Aristotle

14.

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

15.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

16.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Plath, Sylvia

20.

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

21.

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

Temple, Sir William

22.

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

Sandburg, Carl

23.

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

24.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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.

28.

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

Dickinson, Emily

29.

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.

30.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

34.

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.

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.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

37.

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

Voltaire

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

40.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

41.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

49.

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.)

50.

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

Fitzhugh, C.