Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Renard, Jules

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Marquis, Don

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Ashbery, John

12.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

15.

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

16.

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

Joubert, Joseph

17.

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

18.

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

19.

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

Graves, Robert

20.

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.

21.

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

Dickinson, Emily

22.

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

23.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

24.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Chandler, Raymond

26.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

27.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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''

32.

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

Temple, Sir William

33.

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

Joyce, James

34.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

35.

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

36.

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

Fowles, John

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

39.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

40.

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

Plath, Sylvia

41.

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

Morley, Christopher

42.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

43.

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.

44.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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