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.
Who all in raptures their own works rehearse,
And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.
Poets, the first instructors of mankind,
Brought all things to their proper native use.
The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit
Of poets triumphs over it.