~What Is Poetry ???

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen


Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~Kahlil Gibran


Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968


There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955


Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost


Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951


A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry


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, 1851


Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," Intimate Journals, 1864


Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone


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


Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion


Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats


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


Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg


Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats


A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost," Hopwood Lecture, 1947


A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost


Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley


A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else" The Dame School of Experience, 1920


Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell


A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard


"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. ~André Gide


The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen