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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:

And spare the poet for his subject's sake.

William Cowper

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Kavanagh: A Tale (1849)

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Plato

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

John Keats Poems (1817)

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.

Robert Graves

The person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.

Robert Frost

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg

I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.

Cicero

The man is either mad or he is making verses.

Horace

I was promised on a time
To have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Edmund Spenser

To write a verse or two is all the praise
That I can raise.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard becomes
Who void of envy, guile and lust of gain,
On virtue still and nature's pleasing themes
Poured forth his unpremeditated strain.

James Thomson The Castle of Indolence (1748)

I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive.

Nicanor Parra

I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails.

Naomi Shihab Nye Introduction to This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (1992)

Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

Lord Byron

There is one kind of knowledge-infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

A poet not in love is out at sea;
He must have a lay-figure.

Philip James Bailey Festus (1813)

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions…

David Hume

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs.

William Shakespeare

Nevertheless it is allowed to poets to lie. (Poetical license).

Pliny the Younger

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