Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

- Hubbard, Elbert

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.)

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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.

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

Barrymore, John

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

Ashbery, John

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

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

Morley, Christopher

12.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

13.

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.

14.

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''

15.

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

Frost, Robert

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

19.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

21.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

24.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

25.

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

Joubert, Joseph

26.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

38.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

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.

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

41.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

42.

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

Plath, Sylvia

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

48.

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

Voltaire

49.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

50.

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.