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

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

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

Scott, Sir Walter

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

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

Renard, Jules

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

Voltaire

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Joubert, Joseph

16.

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

Ashbery, John

17.

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

18.

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

Fowles, John

19.

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

Temple, Sir William

20.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

21.

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

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

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

Diderot, Denis

27.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

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

33.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

35.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

36.

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

Dickinson, Emily

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

39.

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''

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

44.

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.

45.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

47.

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

Joyce, James

48.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

49.

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

Plath, Sylvia

50.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.