2. A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry
should be and not what poetry actually was and is;
otherwise the most concise formula would be:
Poetry is that which at some time and some place
was thus named.
Friedrich Von Schlegel
3. ...the word "poetry" is often used to mean: how people
construct an intelligibility out of the randomness they
experience; how people choose what they love;
how people integrate loss and gain; how they distort
experience by wish and dream; how they perceive and
consolidate flashes of harmony; how they (to end a list
otherwise endless) achieve what Keats called a
"Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of
Identity.”
Helen Vendler
4. The poem is the point at which our strength gave
out.
Richard Rosen
5. Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human
consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent
requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and
concrete goal, generally suppresses everything
inessential to its purpose; poetry,
existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object,
aims only at completeness and perfection of form.
Richard Harter Fogle
6. Poetry is, above all,
an approach to the truth of feeling....
A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually
—
that is, when you reach it,
you will reach it intellectually too—
but the way is through emotion,
through what we call feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
7. All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
8. Poetry is not only dream and vision;
it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.
It lays the foundations for a future of change,
a bridge across our fears
of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde
10. Poetry is the most direct and simple means of
expressing oneself in words: the most primitive
nations have poetry, but only quite well developed
civilizations can produce good prose. ...
11. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and
unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose
statements: prose is a much less natural way
of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small
children, and to the amount of chanting and
singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I
mean.
Northrop Frye
13. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much
as prose in half the time, and the drawback,
if you do not give it your full attention,
of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Christopher Fry
14. 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
15. 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
16. The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect.
The dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
Language is fossil poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
17. Poetry is the universal language
which the heart holds with nature and itself.
He who has a contempt for poetry,
cannot have much respect for himself,
or for anything else.
William Hazlitt
19. Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder,
with a dash of the dictionary.
Kahlil Gibran
20. Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter
for a jello mold.
Diane Glancy
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land,
wanting to fly in the air.'
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics
Gary Snyder
23. Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it
may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect
understanding will sometimes almost extinguish
pleasure.
A. E. Housman
25. 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
26. Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose,
and the laborious art of exchanging
plain sense for harmony.
Horace Walpole
28. One great advantage which poetry has over prose—
one sense in which, we might even say,
it is considerably more beautiful—
is that it fills up space approximately
three times as rapidly.
James Thurber
29. Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary
genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual
aerobic exercise—nobody need read it,
but anybody can do it.
Marilyn Hacker
30. 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
31. 'If I feel physically as if the top of my head
were taken off, I know that is poetry.'
Emily Dickenson
32. Do you know how poetry started?
I always think that it started when
a cave boy came running back to the cave,
through the tall grass, shouting as he ran,
“Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf.
His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth,
gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been
born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.
Vladimir Nabokov
33. Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—
like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist
—
or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore
around which pedants
can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
34.
35.
36. I could no more define poetry
than a terrier can define a rat.'
A. E. Housman
