"I was at Pontius Pilates house and pist against it."
--Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)

No doubt by the 21c. they'll think "poetry" meant any sort
of confused speech.

In times of language growth the imitation of speech
enriches poetry (Elizabethans); in times of decay, it depletes
it (today).

Squirrels feel superior to cats because squirrels have a
sense of humor and cats don't. [Poets; philosophers.]

Maybe all our age really means is now we have enough people
to manage a Renaissance and a Dark Ages at the same time.

If i am a moralist in art it's because i find it monstrous to cherish
stillborns as living children.

Hypocrisy defines empire. Our new twist is to not know when
we're lying.

"Books written in English had to fight their way into a field already
occupied, and it is clear that until the fourteenth century they
failed to obtain any real popularity among well-to-do people. ...Of
English works...written before 1360, perhaps the majority survive
only in a single copy, which in no single case bears any trace of
the fine writing found in manuscripts for wealthy book-buyers. At a
later date there is no lack of manuscripts of Langland, the Wycliffite
Bible, and Chaucer, some of them most beautifully written and
decorated..." --Pollard, quoted in Schofield's English Literature
from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer

Murasaki has a tanka made of words with double meanings.
"'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings"
--Stainway to Heaven

Johnson, on Horace's Ode I.34: "Sir, he was not in earnest:
this was merely poetical."