Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poets are born, not paid.

- Mizner, Addison

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Voltaire

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.

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

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

Horace

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

Sandburg, Carl

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.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

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

10.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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

Ackerman, Diane

12.

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

Voltaire

13.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

14.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

15.

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

16.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

20.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

21.

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

Marquis, Don

22.

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

Morley, Christopher

23.

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

24.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

25.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Joyce, James

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Dickinson, Emily

30.

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

Joubert, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

33.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

34.

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

Engle, Paul

35.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

40.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Woolf, Virginia

45.

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.

46.

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

Hare, David

47.

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