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.
Philosophers are moral, and poets are picturesque about the country.
Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya.
The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral.
God's most candid critics are those of his children whom he has made poets.