Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Plath, Sylvia

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

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 at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Scott, Sir Walter

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Horace

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

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

Marquis, Don

10.

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.

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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.

13.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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''

16.

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

Engle, Paul

17.

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

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

19.

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

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.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

Joyce, James

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Frost, Robert

27.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

28.

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

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

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

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.

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

Morley, Christopher

34.

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

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Frye, Northrop

39.

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

Barrymore, John

40.

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

41.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

42.

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.

43.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

Aristotle

45.

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

Horace

46.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

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

Hardy, Thomas

49.

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

50.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace