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.
A phoneme, an utterance, could be said to be the beginning of poetry's evolutionary chain.
Wise poets, that wrapt Truth in tales,
Knew her themselves through all her veils.
“Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities” (31).
You said:
"We poets in our youth begin in sadness;
thereof in the end come despondency and madness."
Poetry belongs to the real things—to the realm of the ideal which is "the only real."
Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.
Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.
In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.