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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Horace

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

Hare, David

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

11.

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

Morley, Christopher

12.

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

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

Aristotle

15.

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

Hardy, Thomas

16.

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

17.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Fowles, John

21.

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''

22.

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

Frost, Robert

23.

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

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

25.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

26.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

27.

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

Marquis, Don

28.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

34.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

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

Barrymore, John

36.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Eliot, T. S.

39.

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

40.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

41.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Ashbery, John

45.

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

46.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

47.

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

Engle, Paul

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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