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.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,
On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow
Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below.
The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
Still may syllables jar with time,
Still may reason war with rhyme,
Resting never!
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.
Jewels five-words-long,
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever.
The poet… may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.