Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Woolf, Virginia

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

Sandburg, Carl

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Marquis, Don

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.

10.

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

Dickinson, Emily

11.

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

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

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

16.

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

Chandler, Raymond

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.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

19.

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

Aristotle

20.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

23.

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''

24.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

29.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

30.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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

34.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

37.

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

38.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

39.

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

40.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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.

42.

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

Engle, Paul

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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.

48.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

49.

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

Horace

50.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl