What is Poetry?

50 definitions and counting

Why is it that everyone can identify poetry, but no one can define it? No matter how comprehensive the description, there is always a poem that doesnt quite fit the given parameters. And yet, despite its many forms and styles, many people have a firm idea that they do or dont like poetry. This is often based on exposure to a very few examples, and often in a coercive setting (i.e. school!). What kind of poetic expression speaks to you? Is it possible that one you havent met yet will do the trick? Below is a list of definitions of poetry that Ive come across, in no particular order. No. 50 is my own definition. Please feel free to use Comments to suggest others your own or anyone elses (please only give definitions of poetry or poemnot poet or other related items!). Ultimately, Ill compile a resource page with the final results and acknowledge any contributions that usefully expand this list. 1. poem n. a composition in metre : a composition of high beauty of thought or language and artistic form, in verse or prose : a creation, achievement, etc, marked by beauty or artistry. Chambers Student Dictionary 2. Poetry is emotion put into measure. Thomas Hardy 3. Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. William Hazlitt 4. not to transmit thought but to set up in the readers sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writeris the peculiar function of poetry. A.E. Housman 5. Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Christopher Fry 6. Poetry is a rhythmical form of words which express an imaginative-emotionalintellectual experience of the writersin such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener. Clive Sansom 7. Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802 8. (Poetry is) literature in metrical form : any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling 9. 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 10. Poetry (ancient Greek: (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.
By Talha Basheer

11. Poetry is mans rebellion against being what he is. James Branch Cabell 12. (Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense. Isaac Newton 13. (Poetry is) a literary expression in which words are used in a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an emotional responsewww.iclasses.org/ 14. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg 15. 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 16. Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Robert Frost 17. 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 everyones knowledge of himself and the world around him. Dylan Thomas 18. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) 19. 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 (1888 1965), Tradition and the Individual Talent, II (The Sacred Wood, 1922) 20. Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. Simonides (556 BC 468 BC) 21. (Poetry) is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake. Lord Byron (1788 1824) 22. Poetry is the deification of reality. Edith Sitwell (1887 1964), Life magazine, 0104-63 23. Poetry and Hums arent things which you get, theyre things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you. Winnie-the-Pooh, Poohs Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne 24. Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered 25. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

By Talha Basheer

26. Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. Henry David Thoreau (1817 1862) 27. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot (1888 1965) 28. (Poetry is) texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama 29. Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. Plato (427 BC 347 BC) 30. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.Leonard Cohen 31. Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.Edmund Burke 32. Poetry is basically anything that calls itself a poem. 33. Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. Rita Dove 34. Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran 35. Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. Thomas Gray 36. Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt 37. (Poetry is) an imaginative response to experience reflecting a keen awareness of language. Its first characteristic is rhythm, marked by regularity far surpassing that of prose. Poetrys rhyme affords an obvious difference from prose. Because poetry is relatively short, it is likely to be characterized by compactness and intense unity. Poetry insists on the specific and the concrete. 38. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. Samuel Johnson 39. Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. John Keats 40. Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. Edgar Allan Poe 41. Poetry: the best words in the best order. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 42. 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, On Poetics 43. Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. Marianne Moore 44. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. Carl Sandburg 45. Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis 46. There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. John Cage

By Talha Basheer

47. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. Charles Simic 48. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 49. The poem is a little myth of mans capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we seeit is, rather, a light by which we may see and what we see is life. Robert Penn Warren 50. Poetry is an attempt to capture the essence of the chord struck in the poet by an instant of insight, in such a way that the same music will sound in the soul of the reader.Tia Azulay

By Talha Basheer