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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:

"An insult and a challenge. Those were my own moment of (rude) awakening. They drew me to poetry."

Chijioke Amu-Nnadi

I started writing poetry when I was about 12. Then years later, when I met the Notorious B.I.G., he pushed me to hone my skills.

Charli Baltimore

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
"Political Education" (1951)

Michael Oakeshott Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

There were no Native names in the American book of poetry when I began writing poetry, though there are many.

Joy Harjo An Interview with Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate” in Poets.org (2019)

How do we mourn? How can we grieve? I think poetry opens a door. Poetry helps us to resist.

Mariame Kaba In Who reads poetry (2017)

Best American Poetry, Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Joan Naviyuk Kane

I write all of my music. I’ve always considered myself a better writer than rapper. Poetry segued into writing rhymes. Writing is actual therapy for me.

Charli Baltimore

I find it impossible to think of "favorite" poets. I would rather list the ones I cannot stand.

Billy Collins Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry (2004)

I have a very patchy memory of my childhood. It's one of the things about myself I'm most proud of. (More From the Poetry Corner)

Ben Croshaw

I was introduced to Langston Hughes, who became one of my favorite poets…I mean, he was a poet; he wasn’t about words, he was a poet, he had rhythm.

Pedro Pietri

poetry is about truth, about revealing something of our human nature and about the world.

Daisy Zamora Interview (2023)

The poetic phenomenon is divine, but the words are mine. The trains, the soil, the hens, the backyards are mine, but the poetry in them is divine.

Adélia Prado Interview for Bomb Magazine (1985)

nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

E. E. Cummings A Poet's Advice to Students (1958)

But these days
Of visible poetry have long been past!—
No fear that the young hunter may profane
The haunt of some immortal

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

The poets told thy birth
Was welcomed upon earth
By the sweet multitude of shining flowers,
By bursting buds, green leaves, and sunny hours.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Poetry is bad standup. It's carefully chosen words that have no laugh at the end.*

Jerry Seinfeld Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012)

[Abraham Gotthelf Kästner is] the best mathematician among poets and the best poet among mathematicians

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in The Enlightened Heart : An Anthology of Sacred Poetry (1989) by Stephen Mitchell, p. 50

Dōgen

poetry needed no renascence. It was not young, it is not old.

Florence Earle Coates

Every great book contains matter that could be termed poetry. The Bible is a perfect example. So poetry, even if it's not what I'm doing, is my teacher.

Judith Ortiz Cofer Interview (2000)

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