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.

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Most quoted on poetry:

I believe that my years of doing oral history have helped me pay attention to people’s voices, and this consciousness often shows itself in my poetry.

Margaret Randall Interview (2022)

…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

Anthony Burgess A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

Well let the poets cry themselves to sleep
And all their tearful words will turn back into steam

Conor Oberst I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005)

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.
Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work

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

Poetry is a language with a shape

Michael Schmidt