Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Joubert, Joseph

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

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

Barrymore, John

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

Frost, Robert

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

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''

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

Cocteau, Jean

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

11.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

12.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

13.

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.)

14.

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

15.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

16.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

17.

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

18.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

24.

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.

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

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

27.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

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

Engle, Paul

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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

Horace

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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

Temple, Sir William

40.

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.

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

43.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

44.

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

Marquis, Don

45.

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.

46.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

47.

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

48.

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

Graves, Robert

49.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

50.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell