Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Horace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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

Field, Eugene

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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.)

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

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.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

10.

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

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

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

Engle, Paul

13.

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

Sandburg, Carl

14.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

Barrymore, John

16.

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.

17.

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

Joubert, Joseph

18.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

19.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

23.

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.

24.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

25.

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

Frost, Robert

26.

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

Morley, Christopher

27.

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

Ashbery, John

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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''

30.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

31.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

38.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

39.

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

Horace

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

44.

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

Dickinson, Emily

45.

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

Graves, Robert

46.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

47.

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

Frost, Robert

48.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

50.

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

Aristotle