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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:

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Edith Hamilton The Greek Way (1930)

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Federico Fellini I'm a Born Liar (2003)

I hate painting, and poetry too! Neither the one nor the other ever did any good.

George II of Great Britain John Ireland Hogarth Illustrated (1791)

Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged.

John Maynard Keynes Essays In Biography (1933)

Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.

David Zindell The Broken God (1992)

It is not correct to say that Valmiki is the only Ramayana poet. There are thousands of Ramayana poets. There is a Ramayana poet in every village.

Kuvempu

The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet.

Yehudi Menuhin

There’s more leg room in first class, to be sure, but there’s more poetry in second class—and more honesty in third.

Michael Kurland Ten Little Wizards (1988)

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

Dan Simmons Hyperion (1989)

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Juan Ramón Jiménez Poetry and Literature (1941)

The theorist should not let us forget the poet.

Suzanne Césaire

I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.

Herbert Read Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

One never knows whether the Poet is speaking fact, fancy, or allegory. If fancy is clever enough, I doubt that the Poet would admit a difference between fancy and fact.

Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Poetry is the utterance of truth — deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin Living Words (1860)

I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake.

Rebecca Solnit

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value (1980)

My poems please the brave:
My poems, short and sincere,
Have the force of steel
Which forges swords.

José Martí Simple Verses (1891)

Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study — which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.

Samuel R. Delany The Mad Man (1994)

I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.

Martin Amis London Fields (1989)

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