Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about 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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Frost, Robert

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

Flaubert, Gustave

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Horace

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.)

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

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''

10.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

Graves, Robert

12.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

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

15.

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

Barrymore, John

16.

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

Horace

17.

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.

18.

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

Plath, Sylvia

19.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

20.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

21.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

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

Joubert, Joseph

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

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

Ashbery, John

30.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

31.

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

Sandburg, Carl

32.

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

33.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

34.

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.

35.

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

Woolf, Virginia

36.

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

Ackerman, Diane

37.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

38.

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.

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Hardy, Thomas

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Diderot, Denis

48.

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

Hare, David

49.

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

50.

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