Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Barrymore, John

10.

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

11.

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

Engle, Paul

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Marquis, Don

19.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

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

Hare, David

24.

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

Dickinson, Emily

25.

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

Joyce, James

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

35.

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

36.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

37.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

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.

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

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

47.

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

Joubert, Joseph

48.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

49.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.