Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

- Stevens, Wallace

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Barrymore, John

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Joyce, James

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

Engle, Paul

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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.

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Joubert, Joseph

10.

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

Sandburg, Carl

11.

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

Plath, Sylvia

12.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Cocteau, Jean

14.

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

Aristotle

15.

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

16.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

Field, Eugene

18.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

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.

20.

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.

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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.

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

Horace

29.

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

Voltaire

30.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

35.

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

Ashbery, John

36.

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.

37.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

38.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

39.

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.

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

Hardy, Thomas

42.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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

Ackerman, Diane

45.

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

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

48.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

49.

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