Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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

Barrymore, John

18.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

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

Horace

20.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

21.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

22.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

23.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

24.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

25.

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

Renard, Jules

26.

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.

27.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

29.

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

Auden, W. H.

30.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

31.

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

32.

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

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

Joyce, James

34.

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.

35.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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.)

42.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

43.

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

Plath, Sylvia

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Fowles, John

48.

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

Voltaire

49.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

50.

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