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

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

Engle, Paul

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

Joyce, James

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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.

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

Frost, Robert

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

Horace

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

13.

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.

14.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

15.

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.)

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

Temple, Sir William

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

Morley, Christopher

24.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

27.

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

Woolf, Virginia

28.

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

Sandburg, Carl

29.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

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

31.

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

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

Graves, Robert

34.

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

Plath, Sylvia

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

38.

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.

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

41.

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

Fowles, John

42.

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

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Joubert, Joseph

45.

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

46.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.