For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
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.
When the poets rhyme in the summertime/You'll hear melodies in the words
For rhyme the rudder is of verses,
With which, like ships, they steer their courses.
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
O 'tis a very sin
For one so weak to venture his poor verse
In such a place as this.
A poet rises while falling. It’s the rising in the falling that makes him rise posthumously.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.