Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Dickinson, Emily

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Diderot, Denis

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.

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

Marquis, Don

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

Hare, David

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

10.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

11.

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.)

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

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

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

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

Barrymore, John

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

18.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Hardy, Thomas

21.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Ashbery, John

28.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

29.

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

Morley, Christopher

30.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

31.

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''

32.

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.

33.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

37.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

38.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

39.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

Joyce, James

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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.

50.

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

Plath, Sylvia