Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

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

Fowles, John

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.)

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

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

Aristotle

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Renard, Jules

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

12.

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.

13.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

Roux, Joseph

14.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

16.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

17.

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

Field, Eugene

18.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

22.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

23.

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

24.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

28.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

29.

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

30.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

35.

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

Morley, Christopher

36.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

37.

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

38.

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

Barrymore, John

39.

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

Sandburg, Carl

40.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

44.

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.

45.

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

Engle, Paul

46.

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

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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.

48.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Hare, David

50.

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

Auden, W. H.