Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Barrymore, John

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

21.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

24.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Dylan, Bob

25.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

26.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

27.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

28.

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

Marquis, Don

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

Sandburg, Carl

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hardy, Thomas

34.

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.

35.

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

Field, Eugene

36.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Frost, Robert

38.

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

Joubert, Joseph

39.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

40.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

41.

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.

42.

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

Hare, David

43.

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

44.

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

Dickinson, Emily

45.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

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