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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.

Random quote on Poetry

Most quoted on poetry:

Poetry, a speaking picture... to teach and delight

Philip Sidney An Apology of Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy (1595)

Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.

Friedrich Schlegel

For Poetry is the wisdom of the blood,
That scarlet tree within, which has the power
To make dull words bud forth and burst in flower.

Osbert Sitwell

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities.

Samuel Palmer

The language of poetry is the only speech which has in it the power of permanent impression

George Gilfillan

The authentic British poetry of the second world war was not a poetry of protest, still less was it inspired by patriotic enthusiasm

Vernon Scannell

All true poets are, of course, primarily concerned with artifact, the making of a verbal construct, a durable work of art.

Vernon Scannell

If the sameness and difference of America were to become musical, it would be poetry.

Eli Siegel

Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.

John Hollander

Before reading Romance, one should read the Book of Poetry.

Jin Shengtan

The other. With the other/humanity, dialogue, poetry, begin.

Rosario Castellanos

Poetry can push our boundaries of “speech freedom”, which will allow us to encourage a generation of critical thinkers.

Amata Giramata Giramata on her budding career as a poet (2017)

You have a hatred of the Catholic Church, ... But, for your poetry you will be forgiven. But sin no more.

Maud Gonne

I have always thought that my poetry is a reflection of my life in all its many capacities.

Luz María Umpierre

I believe that the flood of writing by eloquent women in our own time will alter the mainstream of American poetry.

Alicia Ostriker Writing Like a Woman (1983)

“If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.”

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.

Fleur Adcock

"Poetry bears the spirit of the eternal."

Chijioke Amu-Nnadi

If the form of my poetry is thoroughly European, its content is thoroughly African.’

John Eppel

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