Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

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

Voltaire

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Renard, Jules

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.)

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Horace

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

11.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

12.

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

13.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

14.

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

Sandburg, Carl

15.

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

Dickinson, Emily

16.

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

Field, Eugene

17.

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

18.

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

Fowles, John

19.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

20.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Ginsberg, Allen

21.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

22.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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.

25.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

26.

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

27.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

28.

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

29.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

30.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

31.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

32.

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

33.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

34.

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.

35.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Fry, Christopher

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

43.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

44.

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

45.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

46.

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

47.

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

Barrymore, John

48.

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

Cocteau, Jean

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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