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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:

"They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come".

A. A. Milne The House at Pooh Corner (1928)

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

Modest Mussorgsky

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

Dana Gioia

The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry.

Florence Earle Coates

Many modern poets seem to think that poetry should be sensual. It should not—it should be sensuous.

Florence Earle Coates

Haiku can be the antidote against the kind of poetry dominated by egos and battling personalities.

William J. Higginson

The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought.

Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.

Robin Wall Kimmerer Gathering Moss (2003)

All poets, all writers, are terrible parasites. We use people and experiences.

Fleur Adcock

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...

Erica Jong Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

In this consists the difference between painting and poetry : the painter reproduces others, — the poet reproduces himself.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Poetry which has decided to do without music, to divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its reason for being...

Robertson Davies Reading (1990)

The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean - indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.

John Fowles The Ebony Tower (1974)

"For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently it was immensely popular" (24).

Dana Gioia Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration.

Masiela Lusha

I got magic and I got poetry in my fingertips.

Charlie Sheen

She is one of the most brilliant poets ever and has inspired thousands to write poetry on the level of the Vogons and cause widespread fear of such good poetry.

Minnie Louise Haskins

The Vedic hymns were sung in post glacial times (8,000BC) by poets who had inherited their knowledge or contents thereof from their antediluvian forefathers.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak

I sought refuge in my schoolbooks, among the flowers of Greek poetry, or the magical figures of geometry.

Jean Metzinger

Poets are the most difficult creatures to work with.

Suman Pokhrel

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