Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Chandler, Raymond

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

Voltaire

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

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

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.

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

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

Diderot, Denis

10.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

11.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

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

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

15.

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''

16.

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

Marquis, Don

17.

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

18.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

19.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

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

21.

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

Aristotle

22.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

23.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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

Fowles, John

30.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

31.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Ackerman, Diane

36.

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

Hardy, Thomas

37.

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

Horace

38.

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

Frost, Robert

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

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

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

42.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

46.

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

Joubert, Joseph

47.

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

Hare, David

48.

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

Horace

49.

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

50.

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