Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Fowles, John

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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.

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

Chandler, Raymond

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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

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.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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.

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Renard, Jules

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Hare, David

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Field, Eugene

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

25.

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

26.

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

Frost, Robert

27.

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

Barrymore, John

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Ashbery, John

30.

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

Plath, Sylvia

31.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

32.

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

33.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

34.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

36.

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

Fowles, John

37.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

38.

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

39.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

40.

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

Woolf, Virginia

41.

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

42.

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

Marquis, Don

43.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

44.

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

Engle, Paul

45.

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.

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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''

48.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

49.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

50.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert