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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 the most human of arts, for it is language itself that makes us human.”

Gémino H. Abad

It's the biggest poetry thing in western Europe.

Pitika Ntuli

Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.

John Dewey Democracy and Education (1916)

His genius for poetry and music enabled him to reproduce the rhythm and melody, the parallelism and symmetry, of Hebrew poetry and prose.

Philip Schaff

Rhyme is no necessary adjunct of true poetry.

John Milton Samuel Johnson in Lives of the English Poets (1781)

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Carl Sandburg

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

Aristotle

An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.

Robinson Jeffers

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

Joseph Joubert Pearls of Thought (1881)

Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Havelock Ellis

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne The Marble Faun (1860)

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

A religion is a kind of group dream—the subjective poetry in which, supporting one another’s faith or need to believe, we strive desperately to believe.

Weston La Barre Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)

Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is the primary activity of the human mind.

Benedetto Croce

Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Dan Simmons Hyperion (1989)

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Sigmund Freud On his seventieth birthday (1926)

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of death.

Yukio Mishima Runaway Horses (1969)

I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.

John Cage Lecture on Nothing (1949)

"The unacknowledged legislators of the world" describes the secret police, not the poets.

W. H. Auden The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

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