Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Fowles, John

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

Horace

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

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.

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

Hardy, Thomas

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Joubert, Joseph

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

10.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Marquis, Don

13.

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

14.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Engle, Paul

19.

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

Morley, Christopher

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.

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

Field, Eugene

22.

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

Ashbery, John

23.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

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

28.

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

Hare, David

29.

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

30.

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''

31.

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

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

34.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

36.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

38.

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

39.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

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

Barrymore, John

42.

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

Frost, Robert

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

47.

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.

48.

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

Sandburg, Carl

49.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

50.

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

Diderot, Denis