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.
Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column;
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Happy who in his verse can gently steer
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.
A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Love has its priests in the poets, and one hears at times a poet's voice which worthily extols it.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignore most people.
For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.
Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.