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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:

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

Philip Larkin Required Writing (1983)

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

George Henry Lewes The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

"This is one poem
people won't dispute
the winds of winter."

Chowa

All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: “This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”

Richard Weaver Language is Sermonic (1970)

Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.

Amit Ray Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Lifestyle (2012)

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

William Carlos Williams Detail & Prosody for the Poem Patterson given to James Laughlin (1939)

We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.

Dejan Stojanovic The Shape (2000)

Poetry . . . has nothing to do with facts, though everything to do with truth.

Gerald Bullett

Poetry is like time travel, and poems take us to the heart of the matter

Queen Camilla

Poets and prophets do not go into committees.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Eminent Indians (1947)

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics.

Ada Lovelace

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon Recreation (1919)

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Émile Zola

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

Thomas Campbell The Pleasures of Hope (1799)

somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

R. S. Thomas

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.

Boris Pasternak

When Poetry thus keeps its place as the handmaiden of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.

John Wesley

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Octavio Paz Alternating Current (1967)

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