Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

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

Horace

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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.

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Engle, Paul

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

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

Hare, David

13.

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.

14.

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.

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

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

Dickinson, Emily

17.

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

Field, Eugene

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Diderot, Denis

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

Temple, Sir William

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

36.

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

Graves, Robert

37.

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

Ashbery, John

38.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

39.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

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.

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''

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Fowles, John

47.

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

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

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

Hardy, Thomas

50.

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

Sandburg, Carl