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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.

Random quote on Poetry

Most quoted on poetry:

God's prophets of the Beautiful,
These Poets were.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Vision of Poets (1844)

Greece, sound thy Homer's, Rome thy Virgil's name,
But England's Milton equals both in fame.

William Cowper

Sure there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.

John Denham

I can no more believe old Homer blind,
Than those who say the sun hath never shined;
The age wherein he lived was dark, but he
Could not want sight who taught the world to see.

John Denham

With no companion but the constant Muse,
Who sought me when I needed her—ah, when
Did I not need her, solitary else?

Richard Henry Stoddard

Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited.

Marge Piercy My Life, My Body (2015)

The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes.

Anna Margolin Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin (2005)

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring

E. B. White One Man's Meat (1942)

I was singing as a bird mourns.

Alphonse de Lamartine

If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.
Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

Walt Whitman Complete Prose Works (1892)

I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence—this may look like affectation—but it is my real opinion—it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake

Lord Byron

A certain lady went to see the show,
Her real name I know not, nor can guess,
And so we'll call her Laura, if you please,
Because it slips into my verse with ease.

Lord Byron Beppo (1817)

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie —
True Poems flee —

Emily Dickinson

For voices pursue him by day,
And haunt him by night,—
And he listens, and needs must obey,
When the Angel says: "Write!"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it... The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved and logical derangement of all the senses... The poet is really a thief of fire.

Arthur Rimbaud

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare

Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry

Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

Made poetry a mere mechanic art.

William Cowper

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