Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Barrymore, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Fowles, John

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.

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

Graves, Robert

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Marquis, Don

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

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

10.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

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

Woolf, Virginia

14.

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

15.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

22.

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

Horace

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 poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

25.

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

Barrymore, John

26.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

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

Joubert, Joseph

29.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

30.

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

Diderot, Denis

31.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

32.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

33.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

34.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Voltaire

36.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

41.

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.)

42.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

43.

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

44.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

Aristotle

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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

Temple, Sir William

50.

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