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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.

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Most quoted on poetry:

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

John Kenneth Galbraith The Great Crash, 1929 (1954)

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

Wallace Stevens Opus Posthumous (1957)

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness.

Marianne Moore

I have made poetry for a long time but I have less and less confidence in it. Someone like me is no more than a miserable blue cat's nightmare.

Sakutarō Hagiwara Cat Town (2014)

I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin.

Rita Dove

There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice,
And wake from ignorance the Western World.

Samuel Johnson The Tragedy of Irene (1749)

I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.

John Donne Poems (1633)

Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry;
Who wishes to understand the poet
Must go to the poet's land.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope,
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state,
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh (1857)

Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.

Joseph Joubert The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Wallace Stevens Opus Posthumous (1957)

This short book, where joy and sadness are twins, like the ears of Platero, was written for … I have no idea for whom! … For whomever lyric poets write …

Juan Ramón Jiménez ‪Platero and I‬ (1917)

Besides
what have poets, in any case, to do with sin?
They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant
or die! But what am I trying to say?

Anna Akhmatova Poem without a Hero (1963)

Three things, according to poets, are considered bliss in Iceland: hot rye-cakes, plump girls, and cold buttermilk.

Halldór Laxness Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Poetry = heightened talking. Novel = heightened story. Painting = heightened seeing.

Philip Larkin

You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés.

Theodore Roethke Poetry and Craft (1965)

Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.

T. E. Hulme Notes on Language and Style (1929)

Poetry emulates the Cosmos perhaps because the Cosmos itself is the grandest conceivable example of rhythm, rhyme, harmony and concinnity.

Vanna Bonta The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

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