A Defence of Poetry Quotes

“...the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”
― Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“...music, I say, the most divine striker of the senses...”
― Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”
― Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“With a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince and country.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“[Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“Who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught?”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chess-men; and yet, me thinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“It belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.”
― Sir Philip Sidney, The defence of poesy

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense Of Poetry

“the great instrument of moral good is the the imagination.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense Of Poetry

“This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.”
― Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie {An Apologie for Poetrie}

“Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge”
― Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry