Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Flaubert, Gustave

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

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

Voltaire

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

Barrymore, John

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

15.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

17.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

18.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

19.

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

Fowles, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Sandburg, Carl

24.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

25.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

26.

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

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

Woolf, Virginia

32.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

Joubert, Joseph

36.

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

Cocteau, Jean

37.

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

Field, Eugene

38.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

39.

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

40.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

42.

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

43.

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

Marquis, Don

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 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

46.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

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

Ashbery, John

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip