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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:

Mysterious enthusiasm, Love !
The heart's supremest power;—which doth combine
Within itself religion, poetry,
And heroism.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964)

Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)

Marshall McLuhan The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)

Theodore Roethke Poetry and Craft (1965)

I think that passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. (from "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman" 1977)

Adrienne Rich On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979)

poetry in some form is necessary to all—save, perhaps, to those who are content to live upon bread alone.

Florence Earle Coates

poetry, which is the voice of the soul's aspirations, has for it, of all the arts, the most natural and immediate appeal.

Florence Earle Coates

My advice to any poet; you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a notebook and idleness, those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry.

John Cooper Clarke BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs (2019)

I always play or perform music with my poetry. When poetry came into the world, it did not arrive by itself, but it came with music and dance.

Joy Harjo The First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate on How Poetry Can Counter Hate” in Time Magazine (2019)

as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self.

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

Activism and feminism both draw on the imagination, requiring taking risks and thinking outside the box. This is the very definition of poetry.

Margaret Randall Interview (2022)

In 1920, Mrs. Bennett, Edith, and Helen Rootham instituted the Anglo-French Poetry Society, largely as a platform for Mrs. Bennett's recitations.

Victoria Glendinning

Amarantine is an ancient word, which means eternity. The poets describe an undying flower with that word, and I fell in love with that idea ...

Enya Anna interview (2005)

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Basil Bunting What The Chairman Told Tom, from Odes II:6 (1965)

Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will.

A. R. Ammons Paris Review interview (1996)

[T]he Celtic Twilightists achieved the remarkable feat of attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has.

Sorley MacLean

[Poetry] is the voice of a blue heron calling in the marshes of life, the sound of a wind darkly whispering over the reeds on a moonlit night.

Sakutarō Hagiwara Cat Town (2014)

Poetry can be redemptive without being a banal protest; without exuding forced righteousness.” – Uche Nduka

Uche Nduka

I write very little poetry, because I believe poetry is one of the most complicated and difficult forms of literary expression

Sabata-Mpho Mokae

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is the way we feel and the way we remember. (p 23)

Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

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