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.
When I think of poetry, I feel its fierce human suffering and its joy.
Poetry has not been given a pride of place in secondary and tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
Poetry is like claret, one enjoys it only when it is very new, or when it is very old.
Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.
It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.