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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:

The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said.

Marjorie Agosín Invisible Dreamer: Memory, Judaism & Human Rights (2002)

Poetry is my form of healing. I had to write about it to be able to heal from it.

Theresa Lola

Perhaps if I would not have been imprisoned, maybe I would not have written any poetry.

Abdilatif Abdalla

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

William Wordsworth Resolution and Independence (1807)

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

Wallace Stevens Harmonium (1923)

Admit that Homer sometimes nods, that Poets do write trash,
Our Bard has written "Balder dead," and also Balder-dash.

Matthew Arnold

These elements — rhythm, rhyme, harmony and concinnity — can inevitably be identified within whatever is proclaimed 'poetry.'

Vanna Bonta The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

My poetry is exacting a confession
from me: I will not keep the truth
from my song and the heartstringed instrument.

Frank Chipasula Visions and Reflections (1972)

It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order.

Robert Pinsky

Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence.

Herbert Read Form in Modern Poetry (1932)

[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

Alice Meynell The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)

"I studied in Botswana and in the classroom it was the reading of stories that drew me to language, not poetry specifically".

Tjawangwa Dema

Poetry can be really heavy and being able to carry those emotions and hold them is something I get from my acting skills.

Malaika Uwamahoro Artist Malaika Uwamahoro on telling triggering topics shunned by the society (2022)

I have a lot of content in music and poetry that is waiting for me to make visual content for it.

Malaika Uwamahoro Artist Malaika Uwamahoro on telling triggering topics shunned by the society (2022)

Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation.

Mariame Kaba In Who reads poetry (2017)

Quite often I have used my poetry as a sword, and I have brandished it against my internal and external demons.

Claribel Alegría speech (2006)

Poets are the whetstones of wit.

Stephen Gosson The Schoole of Abuse (1579)

I'm a singer of texts, I love poetry, songs that mean something.

El Hachemi Guerouabi

I tried to combine protest against the politics and oppression of the time in a way that would make it possible for the poetry to survive the protest.

Shabbir Banoobhai

Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist (1891)

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