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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:

Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame.

Percy Bysshe Shelley An Exhortation (1819)

Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.

Herman Melville Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

James Joyce James Clarence Mangan (1902)

Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.

Robinson Jeffers

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned; this man is neither simple, sensuous, nor impassioned; therefore he is not a poet.

Emma Lazarus The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889)

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

Louis Kronenberger

He who improvises can never make a perfect line of poetry.

Titian A Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959)

There have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.

Philip Sidney An Apology of Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy (1595)

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)

As parents in private life teach wisdom to their children, so do [poets] in public life to their cities.

Philo

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

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

In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

Seamus Heaney

Poetry merely descriptive of nature, however vivid, no longer seems enough for me, there has to be added to it, the human judgement, the human evaluation.

John Gould Fletcher

How could it be wished that poetry of a mellow age be born when this time is taking showers in the drama of loathsome taste!”

Suman Pokhrel

The art and triumph of poetry are in nothing more seen and felt than in moving the passions.

Joseph Trapp The Preface to The Aeneis of Virgil (1718)

Poetry is always my best friend, a ready platform, when l need to testify for myself and society.

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel

Poetry is a wild plant that does not need intensive care.

Leila Al Mutawa

Poetry must have real-life connection and a message for the people.

Haldhar Nag

"Poetry is a way of preserving memory against the erosion of time. It keeps alive what history often forgets."

Nnorom Azuonye

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