Poetry Quotes
Alexander Pope leads, followed by Florence Earle Coates, Muriel Rukeyser and Horace. Samuel Johnson’s definition in Lives of the English Poets (1779), poetry as the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason, is the best-sourced entry, and Thoreau’s couplet from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is the saddest: his life was the poem he would have written, but he could not both live it and utter it.
Flagged: “All poetry is misrepresentation,” credited to Jeremy Bentham and disputed; a triplet on three poets from three distant ages, credited to Dryden and disputed; and “The crown of literature is poetry,” credited to Somerset Maugham and marked misattributed.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Poets lose half the praise they should have got,
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
Most joyful let the Poet be;
It is through him that all men see.
Happy the poet who with ease can steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.