Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Diderot, Denis

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Aristotle

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

Flaubert, Gustave

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Voltaire

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

Field, Eugene

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Eco, Umberto

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

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Ashbery, John

10.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

11.

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.

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

14.

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.

15.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

16.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

17.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

18.

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.)

19.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Scott, Sir Walter

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.

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

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

37.

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

Temple, Sir William

38.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

39.

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.

40.

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

Frost, Robert

41.

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.

42.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

43.

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

Joubert, Joseph

44.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

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