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

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

Flaubert, Gustave

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

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

Ackerman, Diane

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

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

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

10.

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

11.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

12.

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

Dickinson, Emily

13.

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

Engle, Paul

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Field, Eugene

17.

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

Temple, Sir William

18.

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

Plath, Sylvia

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.

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

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

25.

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

Hardy, Thomas

26.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

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

Hare, David

31.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

Sandburg, Carl

33.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

34.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

35.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

36.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

37.

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

Diderot, Denis

38.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

39.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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.)

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Ashbery, John

45.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Fowles, John

50.

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

Voltaire