Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

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

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Cocteau, Jean

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

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

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

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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.

12.

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

Dickinson, Emily

13.

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

14.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

15.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Hardy, Thomas

21.

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

22.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

23.

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

24.

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

Hare, David

25.

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

Marquis, Don

26.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Joyce, James

29.

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

Ashbery, John

30.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

31.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

32.

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

33.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

34.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

35.

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

36.

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

Fowles, John

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Voltaire

40.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Sandburg, Carl

43.

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

Temple, Sir William

44.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

45.

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

46.

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''

47.

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

Engle, Paul

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

50.

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.)