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

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Engle, Paul

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

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

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

10.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

Joubert, Joseph

12.

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

13.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

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

Fowles, John

16.

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.

17.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

19.

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

Marquis, Don

20.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

22.

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

Woolf, Virginia

23.

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

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

Barrymore, John

25.

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.

26.

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

Field, Eugene

27.

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

Horace

28.

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

Graves, Robert

29.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

Frost, Robert

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

36.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

37.

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

Chandler, Raymond

38.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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

Dickinson, Emily

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

43.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

44.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

48.

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.

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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