Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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''

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

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

10.

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

Barrymore, John

11.

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

12.

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

Frost, Robert

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.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

16.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

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.

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Ackerman, Diane

23.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

24.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

25.

The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Morley, Christopher

26.

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

27.

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

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Diderot, Denis

36.

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.

37.

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

Hare, David

38.

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

Sandburg, Carl

39.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

40.

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

Hardy, Thomas

41.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

42.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

44.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

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

Eliot, T. S.

46.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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

Horace

50.

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