Definitions of Poetry
Here are some definitions and descriptions of poetry, more or less famous, more or less metaphorical, more or less persuasive:
- “Poetry: the best words in the best order.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
- “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” (Emily Dickinson)
- “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” (W.B. Yeats)
- “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
- “Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world” (George Oppen)
- “Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” (Dylan Thomas)
- “Poetry is a form of verbal art that has been found in all languages and in all times. Most, perhaps all human societies put their language to the special use of composing poetry. What distinguishes all poetry from prose is that poetry is made up of lines (verses). Syllables, words, phrases, clauses and sentences are found in both prose and poetry, but only poetry has lines. It is the organization of the text into lines that defines poetry in all languages and literary traditions.” (Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle)
- “Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; […] the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question: How to live.” (Matthew Arnold)
- “Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.” (Ezra Pound)
- “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” (Samuel Johnson)
- “Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” (Martin Heidegger)
- “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” (T.S. Eliot)
- “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.” (A. E. Housman)
- “The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.” (Jean Cocteau)
- “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” (William Wordsworth)
- “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” (Dylan Thomas)
- “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
- “Poetry is language in orbit.” (Seamus Heaney)
- “As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.” (Philip Larkin)
- “[Poetry is] a representing, counterfeiting, a figuring forth: to speak metaphorically: a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight.” (Philip Sidney)
- “Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.” (Octavio Paz)
- “Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard … All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.” (J.S. Mill)
- “Poetry is a dream, dreamed in the presence of reason.” (Tomasso Ceva)
- “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” (Marianne Moore)
- “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.” (Gertrude Stein)
- “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.” (Robert Frost)
- “Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.” (Carl Sandburg)
- “Poetry is emotion put into measure.” (Thomas Hardy)
- “Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” (William Hazlitt)
- “Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.” (Christopher Fry)
- Poetry is a rhythmical form of words which express an imaginative-emotional-intellectual experience of the writer’s…in such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener. (Clive Sansom)
- “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” (Robert Frost)
- “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” (Salvatore Quasimodo)
- “Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry)
- “Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” (James Branch Cabell)
- “Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.” (Robert Lowell)
- “A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning” (Paul Valéry)
- “It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.” (I.A. Richards)
- “(Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense.” (Isaac Newton)
- “A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.” (Robert Frost)
- “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” (Dylan Thomas)
- “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
- “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.” (Simonides, 556-468 BCE)
- “[Poetry] is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” (Lord Byron)
- “Poetry is the deification of reality.” (Edith Sitwell)
- “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
- “Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.” (Henry David Thoreau)
- “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” (T. S. Eliot)
- “Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” (Plato)
- “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” (Leonard Cohen)
- “Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.” (Edmund Burke)
- “Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” (Thomas Gray)
- “Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.” (William Hazlitt)
- “Poetry should… strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” (John Keats)
- “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” (Edgar Allan Poe)
- “The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” (Aristotle)
- “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” (Novalis)
- “There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.” (John Cage)
- “Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” (Charles Simic)
- “[…]poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper” (W.H. Auden)