Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fitzgerald, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Aristotle

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

Plath, Sylvia

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Joyce, James

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

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 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

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

Horace

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

Chandler, Raymond

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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.)

12.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Sandburg, Carl

16.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Mallarme, Stephane

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

22.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

23.

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.

24.

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

Engle, Paul

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

27.

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

Morley, Christopher

28.

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

Hare, David

29.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

33.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

34.

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

Horace

35.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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.

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

39.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

40.

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

41.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

42.

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

43.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

44.

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

Horace

45.

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

Field, Eugene

46.

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

Hardy, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

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.

50.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo