Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Barrymore, John

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

Horace

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

10.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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

Field, Eugene

14.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Hardy, Thomas

16.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

17.

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

18.

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''

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

Engle, Paul

23.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Temple, Sir William

29.

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

30.

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

Eliot, T. S.

31.

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

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.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Ackerman, Diane

35.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

38.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

39.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

40.

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

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Dickinson, Emily

42.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

Fowles, John

45.

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

46.

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.)

47.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Horace