Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

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

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

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

Marquis, Don

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Fowles, John

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

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Plath, Sylvia

10.

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

Graves, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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.

15.

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Scott, Sir Walter

17.

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

18.

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

Frost, Robert

19.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Hazlitt, William

20.

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

21.

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

Flaubert, Gustave

22.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

23.

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

Sitwell, Dame Edith

24.

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

Hare, David

25.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Marquis, Don

26.

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.

27.

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

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

28.

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

29.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

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

33.

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

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

Bodenheim, Maxwell

35.

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.

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

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

Temple, Sir William

38.

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

Woolf, Virginia

39.

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

Ashbery, John

40.

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

41.

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''

42.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

Renard, Jules

44.

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

45.

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

46.

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

Horace

47.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Stevens, Wallace

49.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.