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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.

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Most quoted on poetry:

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

R. S. Thomas

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

Marianne Moore

Poets appeared like flowers on the earth.

Raquel Jodorowsky

To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion.

Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)

I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Denise Levertov Statement on poetics in The New American Poetry (1960)

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Czesław Miłosz

If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.

Bob Black The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I believe he (João Cabral de Melo Neto) was part of Brazil’s great poetry trinity, along with Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Lygia Fagundes Telles conversation (2008)

Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

Lionel Trilling Beyond Culture (1965)

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

Octavio Paz Signs in Rotation (1967)

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

Colin Wilson The Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963)

Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

Muhammad Iqbal

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

Yehudi Menuhin

The late Mr. Froude, with a poet's instinct for unity, chose to regard the whole story of the English Voyages as an aspect of the Protestant Reformation.

Walter Raleigh

I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God...or anything approaching a God...he’s a poet. And a failed one at that.

Dan Simmons The Fall of Hyperion (1990)

He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.

Thomas Carlyle Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845)

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal Preface to Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)

Poets are wiser than anyone because they’re the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

Fritz Leiber The Big Time (1958)

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