Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

- Massinger, Philip

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Barrymore, John

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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.

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

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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.

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

Horace

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

10.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

15.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Temple, Sir William

19.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Hare, David

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Engle, Paul

23.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Aristotle

27.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

33.

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

Joyce, James

34.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

35.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

36.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

37.

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

Horace

38.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Woolf, Virginia

40.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

42.

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

Ashbery, John

43.

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

44.

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

Morley, Christopher

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

49.

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

Fowles, John

50.

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

Frost, Robert