Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Renard, Jules

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Hare, David

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

Horace

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Dickinson, Emily

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Voltaire

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

Frost, Robert

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Auden, W. H.

10.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

11.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

12.

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

Renard, Jules

13.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

14.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

15.

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

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

19.

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

Aristotle

20.

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

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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''

23.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

Joyce, James

27.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

28.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

30.

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

31.

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

Plath, Sylvia

32.

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

33.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

34.

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.

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

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 eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Engle, Paul

50.

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

Aristotle