What is Poetry?
Reprinted from Fieralinque, Thank you!
Things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful.
Dante
The art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Samuel Johnson
The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
William Wordsworth
Musical thought
Thomas Carlyle
Emotion put into measure.
Thomas Hardy
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
Speech framed…to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest and meaning.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
A way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.
Robert Frost
A revelation in words by means of the words.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.
Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry”, 1925
Not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
T. S. Eliot
The clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
The body of linguistic constructions that men usually refer to as poems.
J. V. Cunningham
Hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.
Elizabeth Bishop
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious.
Robert Bly
Poetry is the synthesis of hyancinths and bisquits.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
The story of a soul.
Czeslaw Milosz
Getting something right in language
Howard Nemerov
Poetry is the great stimulation of life… Poetry is redemption from pessimism.
Susan Howe
A poem is anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of attention.
William Stafford
I would define poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe
Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.
S. T. Coleridge
… the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion of the imagination…
Macaulay
…the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds…
Shelley
…speech framed…to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning…
Gerard Manley Hopkins
…the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from and overclothed blindness to a naked vision…
Dylan Thomas
…language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that can not be said…
E. A. Robinson
…the art of saying everything and reducing it to nothing…
Barbara Hyett
POEM: a composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense of experience, characterized by the use of condensed language chosen for its sound and suggestive power as well as its meaning, and by the use of such literary techniques as structured meter, natural cadences, rhyme, or metaphor.
American Heritage Dictionary
A poem is “a sonorous molded shape of form”.
Osip Mandelstam
… a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcyle…
W. H. Auden
Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.
Joseph Brodsky
A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.
Charles Simic
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it… by way of the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.
Charles Olson
Prose goes all the way to the margin, poetry doesn’t.
…
A momentary stay against confusion.
Robert Frost
Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur
Lewis Carroll
Poetry is sense, sensed.
Wendy Battin
Poetry is not prosody. It is not technique. Poetry is born out of revelation to one’s self of the meaning of your own life.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is like fish: if it’s fresh, it’s good; if it’s stale, it’s bad; and if you’re not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Shelley
Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.
Philip Sidney ~Apologie for Poetrie~
What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson ~Boswell’s Life~
Poetry is, if nothing else, the validation of the “elsewhere” and returning it to a happening “here” – in text or other inscription.
Todd Swift
In science one tries to tell people, in a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.
Ambrose Bierce
I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature.
Neruda
Poetry is what birds would do far better than we if they could play tennis.
Bob Grumman
… we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of that unlimited vastness.
Italo Calvino, 1985
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
John Ruskin 1819-1900
Sir, what is poetry?’
Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.’
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost 1874-1963
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.
John Keats 1795-1821
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A.E. Housman 1859-1936
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope 1863-1933
Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.
John Keats 1795-1821
We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
Owen Meredith, Earl of Lytton 1981-1891
Most people have so vague an idea of poetry that their vagueness on their score serves as their definition of poetry
–Paul Valéry, Littérature (1930)
Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn’t work. Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written.
Charles Simic, ~A Fly in the Soup~
It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifyer without poetry.
Philip Sidney, ~Apologie for Poetrie~
What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson ~Boswell’s Life~
The question of what poetry communicates, if anything, has been largely forced upon us by the advent of ‘modern’ poetry. Some of that poetry is admittedly highly difficult – a very great deal of it is bound to appear difficult to the reader of conventional reading habits, even in spite of the fact – actually, in many cases, because of the fact – that he is a professor of literature. –
Cleanth Brooks ~The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry~
Poetry is a way of mind; the exploration of a tunnel, where blind albino fish seem to float in nostalgic pools of unremembered memory.
Russell Edson.
Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls–and somehow stands for–everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.
Italo Calvino
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
Poetry, as we use the word, is a surrender to the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
James Finnegan
Poetry is a Mercurial state of language into which verse or prose or any verbal amalgam may turn.
Richard Dillon
What makes us so fond of (the prose poem) is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition….Prose poems cannot be perfected, they are not literary constructions…prose poems have no place to go. Abundance and spontaneity; spontaneous abundance in imitation of the joy and energy of general creation and substance.
Russell Edson
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality know what it means to want to escape these things.
T.S. Eliot
Poetry is the great art of constructing transcendental health. Hence the poet is the transcendental physician. [122]
Novalis, Pollen and Fragments, translated by Arthur Versluis
(Phanes Press, 1989)
Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolution by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation. Poetry reveals this world; it creates another. Bread of the chosen; accursed food. It isolates; it unites. Invitation to the journey; return to the homeland. Inspiration, respiration, muscular exercise. Prayer to the void, dialogue with absence; tedium, anguish, and despair nourish it. Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence. Exorcism, conjuration, magic. Sublimation, compensation, condensation of the unconscious. Historic expression of races, nations, classes. It denies history: at its core all objective conflicts are resolved and man at last acquires consciousness of being something more than a transient. Experience, feeling, emotion, intuition, undirected thought. Result of chance; fruit of calculation. Art of speaking in a superior way; primitive language. Obedience to the rules; creation of others. Imitation of the ancients, copy of the real, copy of a copy of the Idea. Madness, ecstasy, logos. Return to childhood, coitus, nostalgia for paradise, for hell, for limbo. Play, work, ascetic activity. Confession. Innate experience. Vision, music, symbol.
Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre