Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

Frost, Robert

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

12.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

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

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Joyce, James

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.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

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

19.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

20.

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.)

21.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

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 what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

29.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

30.

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

31.

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

Morley, Christopher

32.

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

Chandler, Raymond

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Fowles, John

35.

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.

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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.

38.

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

Graves, Robert

39.

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

Hare, David

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

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

Joubert, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Renard, Jules

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo