Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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.

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

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

Ashbery, John

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Sandburg, Carl

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

Engle, Paul

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

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

Horace

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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 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

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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.

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.

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

Stedman, Captain J. G.

17.

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

Renard, Jules

18.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Hare, David

19.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

20.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

21.

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

Frost, Robert

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

Fitzhugh, C.

24.

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

Hardy, Thomas

25.

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

Mallarme, Stephane

26.

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

Hare, David

27.

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.

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Voltaire

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.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Ackerman, Diane

38.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

39.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

40.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Joyce, James

45.

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

Diderot, Denis

46.

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

47.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

49.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

50.

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