Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Rilke, Rainer Maria

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Engle, Paul

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

Morley, Christopher

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

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

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

Scott, Sir Walter

10.

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.

11.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

12.

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

13.

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

Ackerman, Diane

14.

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.)

15.

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

16.

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

Temple, Sir William

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Graves, Robert

21.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

22.

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

23.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

24.

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

Hardy, Thomas

25.

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

Eliot, T. S.

26.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

27.

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

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

Sandburg, Carl

30.

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

Fowles, John

31.

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

32.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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.

34.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

35.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

36.

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

Aristotle

37.

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

38.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

39.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

Horace

42.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

43.

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

44.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

45.

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

Sandburg, Carl

46.

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

47.

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

Barrymore, John

48.

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

49.

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

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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