Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

- Sandburg, Carl

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

Horace

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

Frost, Robert

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Temple, Sir William

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

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

10.

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

Horace

11.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

12.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

13.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

14.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Sandburg, Carl

17.

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.)

18.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

19.

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

Aristotle

20.

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

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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''

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

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.

26.

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

Graves, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Plath, Sylvia

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

Eliot, T. S.

33.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

34.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

37.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

42.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

43.

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

Ashbery, John

44.

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

Horace

45.

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.

46.

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

Marquis, Don

47.

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

48.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.