Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Sitwell, Dame Edith

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

Hardy, Thomas

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

Joubert, Joseph

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

Sandburg, Carl

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Fowles, John

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

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

Voltaire

10.

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

11.

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

Aristotle

12.

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

Fitzgerald, Robert

13.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

14.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Marquis, Don

16.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip

20.

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

Barrymore, John

21.

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

Ashbery, John

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

24.

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

25.

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

Joyce, James

26.

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

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.

30.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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

32.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Frost, Robert

34.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

35.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

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.

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

39.

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

Renard, Jules

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Farquhar, George

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

45.

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

Engle, Paul

46.

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

47.

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

Dickinson, Emily

48.

Poets are born, not paid.