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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 not a metrical exercise.

James Fenton

When the poet said that for him poetry was not a purpose, but a passion, he was also expressing the feelings of the true scientist to his own field.

Varadaraja V. Raman

The Second Amendment is about protecting your right to go deer hunting the same way that the First Amendment is about protecting your right to publish poetry.

James Wesley Rawles Tools For Survival (2009)

There is only one art of writing, and that is the art of poetry..whether it is in the form of prose or in rhyme and meter or in rhymed cadence.

F. S. Flint Otherworld Cadences (1920)

The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.

John Hollander

Poetry is for the inner ear.

Vachel Lindsay A Poet in America (1935)

Ever since I started writing poetry seriously, I have used English inappropriately.

Cathy Park Hong Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

"It was a devised work using South African poetry, projected photographs, dance and narration to chart the country’s transition from Apartheid to democracy.

Nadia Davids

[M]ost of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are.

Christopher Ricks The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999)

My poetry is about my understanding about being in London, Britain, the world.

Caleb Femi

For what made that in glory shine so long
But poets' Pens, pluckt from Archangels' wings?

John Davies

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

Bob Dylan

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism...

Stephen Spender The Struggle of the Modern (1963)

"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"
"Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes."

Jack London Martin Eden (1909)

You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality

Friedrich Schlegel

Poetry is not; or seems not to be.

Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is" there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957)

Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.

Daniel Levitin The World in Six Songs (2008)

Toyo Eicho ... drew his material from sutras, recorded sayings of Chinese Zen masters, Taoist texts, Confucian texts, and Chinese poetry.

Tōyō Eichō

I often say, and it is not a joke, that poetry is not incompatible with prosperity,”

Louise Mushikiwabo

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