Ezra Pound said poetry is “news that stays news,” which I’ve always liked.
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.
I love the poetry of all the elements, earth, wind, water, fire and air, combining into one form.
I think of it as an archive of poetry of this time that will still be readable in 20 or 50 years.
Sublime Lucretius' poetry will pass away
Only when Earth has seen its final day.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product.
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs.
For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.