Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fitzhugh, C.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Chandler, Raymond

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

18.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Marquis, Don

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

Plath, Sylvia

26.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

30.

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

Graves, Robert

31.

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

Ashbery, John

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

35.

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

Eliot, T. S.

36.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

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

Renard, Jules

39.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

40.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

41.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

42.

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

Joyce, James

43.

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

Fowles, John

44.

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

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

48.

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.)

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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.