Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

- Brooks, Gwendolyn

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Aristotle

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Horace

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

10.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

Hardy, Thomas

12.

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

Horace

13.

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

Diderot, Denis

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

18.

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

Plath, Sylvia

19.

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

20.

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

Frost, Robert

21.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

22.

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

23.

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

Temple, Sir William

24.

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

Graves, Robert

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Joubert, Joseph

32.

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

Horace

33.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Woolf, Virginia

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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''

38.

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

Chandler, Raymond

39.

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

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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.

42.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

43.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

44.

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

Barrymore, John

45.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.