Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fitzgerald, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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 indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

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.

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.)

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Barrymore, John

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

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

12.

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

Graves, Robert

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

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

Joubert, Joseph

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

Temple, Sir William

18.

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

19.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

20.

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

Horace

21.

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.

22.

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

Horace

23.

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

24.

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

Engle, Paul

25.

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

Ackerman, Diane

26.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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''

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Plath, Sylvia

31.

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

32.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

34.

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

Hardy, Thomas

35.

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

36.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

37.

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

38.

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

Morley, Christopher

39.

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

40.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

47.

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

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.

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

50.

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