Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Engle, Paul

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

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

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Sandburg, Carl

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

Diderot, Denis

15.

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.

16.

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

Renard, Jules

17.

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

Chandler, Raymond

18.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

19.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

20.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

21.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

26.

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

27.

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

Graves, Robert

28.

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

Hare, David

29.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

30.

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.

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

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

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

36.

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

Sandburg, Carl

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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

39.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

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

Barrymore, John

43.

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

44.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

Marquis, Don

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.

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

Sandburg, Carl

48.

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

49.

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

Joubert, Joseph

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.