Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Marquis, Don

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.

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

Aristotle

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.

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

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.

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

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

Renard, Jules

10.

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.

11.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

12.

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

Frost, Robert

13.

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

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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

Temple, Sir William

15.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

16.

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

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

19.

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

Sandburg, Carl

20.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

21.

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

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Joyce, James

25.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

26.

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

Horace

27.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

28.

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

Voltaire

29.

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

30.

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

Hardy, Thomas

31.

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

32.

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.)

33.

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

Cocteau, Jean

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Dickinson, Emily

36.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

37.

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

38.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

40.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

41.

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''

42.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

43.

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.

44.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

46.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

49.

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

Ashbery, John

50.

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