Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Graves, Robert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fowles, John

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

Hare, David

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Diderot, Denis

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Barrymore, John

10.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

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

18.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

22.

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

Temple, Sir William

23.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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.

31.

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''

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Eliot, T. S.

34.

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

35.

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

Morley, Christopher

36.

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

Joubert, Joseph

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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.

39.

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

Hardy, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

Ackerman, Diane

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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

Plath, Sylvia

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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.)

50.

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