Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

Frost, Robert

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

Cocteau, Jean

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 the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

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

Fitzhugh, C.

10.

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.)

11.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

12.

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

Horace

13.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

14.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Engle, Paul

18.

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

Ashbery, John

19.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

20.

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

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

24.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

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

26.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Sandburg, Carl

27.

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.

28.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

29.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

32.

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.

33.

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

Hare, David

34.

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

Fowles, John

35.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

36.

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

Temple, Sir William

37.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

38.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

40.

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.

41.

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

Ackerman, Diane

42.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

43.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

45.

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

Barrymore, John

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.

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''

48.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

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

Marquis, Don

50.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William