What Is Poetry? 111 Definitions From Around The Web
The most searched poetry phrase on the Google Search Engine is, “What is poetry?” It got me wondering… Why aren’t we satisfied with the definitions provided by all the trusted sources like Merriam-Webster, The Oxford English Dictionary and Dictionary.com? Moreover, why is defining poetry so important to people?
I read a paper by Petronius Arbiter entitled What Is Poetry from a 1918 article in The Art World publication in which the author stated, “…The reason we have no accepted definition of Poetry and of Art is principally the objection of poets and artists to all definitions per se, because definitions would restrict, not their liberty in art, but their license.”
I found his statement ironic because it would appear that artists prefer to do the defining themselves. Below you will find a comprehensive collection of 115 poetry quotes (or poetry definitions) from around the web that attempt to define poetry.
Poetry is partly sympathy, don’t you think? If it’s any good, it gets people to think about others’ points of view. – Edwin Morgan
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. – Mary Oliver
Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you’ve walked into air. – Robin Coste Lewis
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence. – Edmund Clarence Stedman
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. – Gaston Bachelard
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. – David Whyte
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. – William Hazlitt
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. – Archibald MacLeish
Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion. – Wale
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can’t be used for manipulation; it’s why you never see good poetry in advertising. – David Whyte
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action. – Juan Felipe Herrera
Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words. – Tahar Ben Jelloun
Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization. – Orson F. Whitney
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it’s how I fire the furnace of writing. – Luis Alberto Urrea
Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. – Beecher
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. – W.H. Auden
Writing poetry is a state of free float. – Margaret Atwood
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. – Carl Sandburg
I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. – Lucille Clifton
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’ – Sonia Sanchez
Poetry lies its way to the truth. – John Ciardi
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Leonardo da Vinci
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T.S. Eliot
Poetry is frosted fire. – J. Patrick Lewis
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg
There is poetry as soon as we realize we possess nothing. – John Cage
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. – Christopher Fry
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. – Allen Ginsberg
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. – Eli Khamarov
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. – Paul Engle
Poetry is an act of peace. – Pablo Neruda
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. – Carl Sandburg
Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. – Robert Frost
For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. – Yevgeny Yentushenko
Poetry is the deification of reality. – Edith Sitwell
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. – Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. – Kahlil Gibran
Prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet. – Thomas Hardy
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. – George Sand
Poetry is the only art people haven’t yet learnt to consume like soup. – W. H. Auden
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul. – John Keats
Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. – Edgar Allan Poe
If you tell a novelist, ‘Life’s not like that’, he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, ‘No, but I am.’ – Philip Larkin
Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. – Jorge Luis Borges
Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football. – Robert Frost
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. – Raymond Chandler
Poetry is life distilled. – Gwendolyn Brooks
Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting. – Simonides
Prose is a museum where all the old weapons of poetry are kept. – T. E. Hulme
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning 5 or 6 times. – Randall Jarrell
Poetry is talking on tiptoe. – George Meredith
Poetry is a religion with no hope. – Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. – Robert Frost
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. – Thomas Gray
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. – John Wain
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. – Adrienne Rich
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. – Samuel Beckett
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. – Julian Barnes
A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. – Salman Rushdie
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. – Khalil Gibran
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them. – Friedrich Nietzsche
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. – Robert Frost
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. – William Wordsworth
Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails 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 might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. – W.H. Auden
Poets aren’t very useful. / Because they aren’t consumeful or very produceful. – Ogden Nash
What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you’re a poet. But there isn’t one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn’t any formula for it. – Erica Jong
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. – John Keats
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. – Percy Bysshe Shelley
What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.- Jean Marais
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me. – Peter Davison
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy. – Muhammad Iqbal
Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy. – Robert Pinsky
Poetry is life distilled. – Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. – Leonard Cohen
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry. – Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. – Jose Ortega Gasset
Poetry is all nouns and verbs. – Marianne Moore
Poetry is a sort of homecoming. – Paul Celan
Poetry is composing for the breath. – Peter Davison
Poetry is a mere drug. – George Farquhar
Love is the poetry of the senses. – Honore de Balzac
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. – Aristotle
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is. – James Branch Cabell
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler. – Mark Strand
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. – Robert Fitzgerald
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. – Charles Simic
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique. – Karl Shapiro
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate. – John Denham
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. – John Ashbery
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak. – Jim Harrison
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. – Thomas Hardy
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. – James Joyce
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society. – Octavio Paz
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. – Adrienne Rich
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. – Carl Sandburg
Some of these quotes are hundreds of years old, yet, to this day, there isn’t a single one I could argue is untrue. Maybe that is the nature of poetry, to evolve alongside humanity and reveal its many faces as it sees fit. As you progress with your journey with this beautiful art form, consider that maybe the question isn’t ‘what is poetry?’, Perhaps the right question is- What does poetry mean to you?
Remember to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. @pickmeuppoetry. On a lighter note, check out these 13 poetry scenes from movies in recent history.
