Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Voltaire

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

Frost, Robert

10.

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

Engle, Paul

11.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Hare, David

20.

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

Sandburg, Carl

21.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

24.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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.)

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

Ackerman, Diane

35.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

Marquis, Don

38.

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

Morley, Christopher

39.

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

Dickinson, Emily

40.

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

Renard, Jules

41.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

44.

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.

45.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

50.

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

Scott, Sir Walter