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.
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing.
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
Like the river, swift and clear,
Flows his song through many a heart.
a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.
—Poets and anarchists are always the first to go.
—Where.
—To the frontline. Wherever it is.
Our Poets make us laugh at Tragœdy,
And with their Comoedies they make us cry.
Bless poetry books that cross oceans
in battered envelopes,
bearing small flames of words.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet
Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it.