Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fowles, John

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

Engle, Paul

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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, 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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

15.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

23.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

24.

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

Dickinson, Emily

25.

It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my poems are competing.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

26.

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.

27.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

28.

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.

29.

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

Plath, Sylvia

30.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

31.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Sitwell, Dame Edith

32.

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

Diderot, Denis

33.

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

Sandburg, Carl

34.

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

35.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Ashbery, John

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

41.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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

Horace

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.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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

Hardy, Thomas

47.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

48.

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

Joubert, Joseph

49.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

50.

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''