What Is Poetry?

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense,
which very few have.
John Masefield (1878-1967)



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 (1792- 1822)



There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)



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 (1892-1969)

 

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie (1866-1925)



Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
William C. Bryant (1794- 1878)



What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer (1929-____)



Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939)



Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)



My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.
Countee Cullen (1903-1946)



We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)



Prose [is] words in their best order; Poetry [is] the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)



You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo (1932-____)



Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it

The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art.
Sonia Sanchez (1934-____)



I've decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates (470?-399? BC)



He who draws noble delights from the sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand (1804-1876)



Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)



When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)



With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams (1919-____)



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.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks. . . and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. . . . Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences . . .

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)



Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell



In science one tries to tell people, in such 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 (1902-1984)



Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot



Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
Voltaire



Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Brague



A poet is someone who is astonished by everything.
Anon



Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis



I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
Russell Baker



Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost



It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
W. H. Auden



Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician . . . or else it is nothing, an empty, formalised bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald