Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Aristotle

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 what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

10.

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.

11.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

12.

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

Morley, Christopher

13.

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

14.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Hare, David

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

20.

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

Fowles, John

21.

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

Graves, Robert

22.

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

Diderot, Denis

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

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.

25.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Joyce, James

33.

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.

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

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

Hardy, Thomas

37.

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

Sandburg, Carl

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Sandburg, Carl

41.

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

Engle, Paul

42.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

43.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

44.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

45.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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

Baudelaire, Charles