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.
What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm .
The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.
I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad Poets.
Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.