Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fowles, John

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

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Sandburg, Carl

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Hare, David

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Aristotle

10.

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''

11.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

12.

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.

13.

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

Temple, Sir William

14.

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

Hardy, Thomas

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

17.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

21.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

28.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

29.

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

30.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

32.

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

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

Dickinson, Emily

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

36.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

37.

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

38.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Artaud, Antonin

39.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

40.

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

Ackerman, Diane

41.

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

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Renard, Jules

47.

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

Frost, Robert

48.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

Brodsky, Joseph

49.

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

Engle, Paul

50.

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