Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Bodenheim, Maxwell

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Fowles, John

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

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

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

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

12.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

13.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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.

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Hare, David

21.

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

Plath, Sylvia

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Hardy, Thomas

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Barrymore, John

27.

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

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

34.

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

Sandburg, Carl

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Diderot, Denis

39.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

40.

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

Marquis, Don

41.

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

42.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

43.

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

44.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

45.

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

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

47.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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