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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 is part of our culture in many ways.

Suman Pokhrel

Spoken Word poetry is an art form that fits me well because it enables me to bring all the layers of who I am into one space — A reader, writer, and performer…

Raymond Antrobus

In fact, as expressed in one of my poems written in prison, I wear my prison sentence for poetry as a badge of honor.

Stella Nyanzi

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Coleman Barks The Essential Rumi (1995)

There can be no poetry without spirit.

Edith Tiempo

Anything that smacked of sincerity, tenderness, or emotionality was off-limits, and poetry seemed immersed in all of that.

Alex Jovanovich

The end result of every work of art should be a piece of poetry. To look for that is my passion and my justification”.

Jean Welz

Have you not heard the poets tell
How came the dainty Baby Bell
Into this world of ours?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The poets feign that when the world began,
Both sexes in one body did remain

Joshua Sylvester

Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice

Izaak Walton The Compleat Angler (1653)

Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry.

Ryōkan Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf : Zen Poems of Ryokan (1993)

Sometimes I think Johnson´s Lives of the English Poets is all I need to be happy.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

The Epicureans especially made sport with the paltry Poetry that came from Delphos.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)

Music...is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.

Victor Hugo William Shakespeare (1864)

The wine is bottled poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson The Silverado Squatters (1883)

But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And ev'ry warbler has his tune by heart.

William Cowper Table Talk (1782)

I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words.

Dylan Thomas Poetic Manifesto (1951)

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

Adrienne Rich

You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it !

Marianne Moore

Marlowe, bathed in Thespian springs
Had in him those brave translunary things,
That the first poets had.

Michael Drayton

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