Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Graves, Robert

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

Voltaire

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Thoreau, Henry David

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

10.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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

14.

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

Chandler, Raymond

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Horace

19.

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

20.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

21.

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

Temple, Sir William

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.

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

24.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

26.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

28.

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

29.

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

Hardy, Thomas

30.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

35.

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

Diderot, Denis

36.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

37.

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.)

38.

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.

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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''

45.

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

46.

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

Engle, Paul

47.

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

Barrymore, John

48.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.