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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Morley, Christopher

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

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

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

10.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

11.

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

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

14.

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

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

17.

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

Horace

18.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

19.

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

20.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ackerman, Diane

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

28.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

29.

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

Dickinson, Emily

30.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

31.

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

Joubert, Joseph

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

35.

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

36.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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.

38.

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

Horace

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.