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:

There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation.

Suman Pokhrel

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. [...] and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

A. E. Housman The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933)

It must be the caress of the useless,/the endless sadness of being a poet,/of singing and singing, without breaking/the peerless tragedy of existence.

Julia de Burgos Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1982)

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.

Simonides of Ceos

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Paul Engle