Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Graves, Robert

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

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 is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Horace

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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.

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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.

12.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

14.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

15.

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

Dickinson, Emily

16.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

17.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

18.

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

Frost, Robert

19.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

20.

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

Cocteau, Jean

21.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

25.

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

26.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

27.

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Renard, Jules

29.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

30.

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

31.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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.

34.

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

Joubert, Joseph

35.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Horace

40.

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

Barrymore, John

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 eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Sandburg, Carl

44.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

45.

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

Hardy, Thomas

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

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

48.

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

Marquis, Don

49.

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

50.

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.