Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

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 one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

Temple, Sir William

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

Eliot, T. S.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Frost, Robert

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.

10.

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.

11.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

12.

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

Hardy, Thomas

13.

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.)

14.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Woolf, Virginia

21.

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

Horace

22.

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''

23.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Dickinson, Emily

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

33.

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

Horace

34.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

37.

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

Hare, David

38.

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

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

44.

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

Sandburg, Carl

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

47.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

50.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert