Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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''

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

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 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

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

Engle, Paul

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

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

Voltaire

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

Flaubert, Gustave

10.

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

Hardy, Thomas

11.

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

12.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

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

14.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

17.

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

18.

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

Sandburg, Carl

19.

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

20.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

21.

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

Temple, Sir William

22.

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

23.

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

Renard, Jules

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

27.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

28.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

29.

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

30.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

Hare, David

33.

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.)

34.

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

Morley, Christopher

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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.

37.

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

Graves, Robert

38.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

39.

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

Horace

40.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

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

Joubert, Joseph

43.

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.

44.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.