Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Scott, Sir Walter

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Auden, W. H.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Voltaire

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

11.

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

12.

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

Dickinson, Emily

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.

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.

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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.

17.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

18.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

19.

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

20.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

21.

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

Temple, Sir William

22.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

23.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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.

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

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

Barrymore, John

29.

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.

30.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

31.

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

Frost, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

35.

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

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

38.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

43.

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

Horace

44.

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.

45.

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

Hare, David

46.

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

Sandburg, Carl

47.

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

48.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

49.

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

50.

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