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.
Whoever would understand the poet
Must go into the poet's country.
If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.
To connect the external object with the internal emotion is the sweetest privilege of poetry.
There is in Poesy a decent pride,
Which well becomes her when she speaks to Prose,
Her younger sister.
The poetry of earth is never dead;
* * * * *
The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.
While pensive poets painful vigils keep,
Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.