Poetry And Poets

(265 votes)   the best made plans of mice and men often go astray

Robert Burns

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(249 votes)   I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence --this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Lord Byron
1788-1824, British Poet

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(249 votes)   Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822, British Poet

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(249 votes)   Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822, British Poet

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(245 votes)   As to ''Don Juan,'' confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Lord Byron
1788-1824, British Poet

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(207 votes)   Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

James Joyce
1882-1941, Irish Author

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(192 votes)   I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; --poetry = the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834, British Poet, Critic, Philosopher

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(186 votes)   That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834, British Poet, Critic, Philosopher

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(185 votes)   You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Joseph Joubert
1754-1824, French Moralist

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(175 votes)   Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Alphonse De Lamartine
1790-1869, French Poet, Statesman, Historian

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(140 votes)   Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Jean Cocteau
1889-1963, French Author, Filmmaker

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(127 votes)   We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Elizabeth Drew
1887-1965, Anglo-American Author, Critic

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(119 votes)   It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire
1694-1778, French Historian, Writer

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(111 votes)   Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926, German Poet

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(109 votes)   Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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