Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Joubert, Joseph

Cocteau, Jean

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

Joyce, James

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

Horace

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

Barrymore, John

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

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.)

10.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

11.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

12.

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

13.

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

Hare, David

14.

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

Engle, Paul

15.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

25.

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

Aristotle

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Graves, Robert

28.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

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

Hardy, Thomas

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

39.

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

40.

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

Morley, Christopher

41.

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

Voltaire

42.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Field, Eugene

45.

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

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

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

Temple, Sir William

50.

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

Aristotle