Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fitzhugh, C.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Hardy, Thomas

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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.

12.

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

Joubert, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

17.

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

Diderot, Denis

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

21.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

22.

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.

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

25.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

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

28.

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

Engle, Paul

29.

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.)

30.

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Fowles, John

35.

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

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.

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

38.

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

Horace

39.

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

40.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

44.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

45.

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

Field, Eugene

46.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

47.

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