Poetry

Works to read

• The Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica) by Horace, c. 19-10 BC
• Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, 1938
• The Oxford Book of English Verse by Christopher Ricks (editor), 1999
• Poetics by Aristotle, c. 335 BCE · Great Books
• The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, c. 1220
• The Task by William Cowper, 1785
• Complete Poems by Dorothy Parker, 1926–1936 (collections)
• Cædmon's Hymn by Cædmon, c. 658-680
• An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope, 1711
• Poems and Songs of Robert Burns by Robert Burns, 1786-1796
• Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth, 1798
• Essay on Burns by Thomas Carlyle, 1828

Passages

• Poetry is to be weighed in the scales

  — Aristophanes, The Eleven Comedies

• If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole

  — Plato, Ion

• Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

  — Aristotle, Poetics

• All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river

  — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

• just as a clean beast chews on a cud, transformed it into the sweetest of poetry

  — Cædmon, Cædmon's Hymn

• So long as he was surrounded by his friends he retained his youth and the poetry of his character

  — Alexandre Dumas, Twenty Years After

Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: poetry, poet, poem, verse. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.