Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Hare, David

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

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''

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

Plath, Sylvia

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.

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

Morley, Christopher

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

10.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

11.

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

Ashbery, John

12.

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

Renard, Jules

13.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Joubert, Joseph

15.

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

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

20.

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

21.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

22.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

24.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

25.

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

Graves, Robert

26.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

27.

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

28.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

35.

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

Barrymore, John

36.

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

37.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

38.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

39.

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

40.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

45.

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

46.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

47.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

Engle, Paul

49.

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