I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. – A. E. Housman

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythmbound in poets’ minds, defying time and age. – Dave Beard

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. – Jean Cocteau

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. – Samuel Johnson

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. – W. Somerset Maugham

You’re not quite sure what it means but the words are so beautiful you know it must be profound. – Terri Guillemets

Poetry is life distilled. – Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. – Thomas Gray

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. – Rita Dove

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. – Matthew Arnold

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question: How to live. – Matthew Arnold

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. – Salman Rushdie

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. – Dennis Gabor

The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely human sense the high priest of the true, the beautiful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them. – Alexandre Vinet

One demands two things of a poem.  Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor  to the language in which it is written.  Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective.  What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves. – W. H. Auden

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

[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. – Robert Frost

There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader. – Robert Frost

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. – Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  –  Robert Frost

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson

The ugly is in poetry only a passing shadow. – Alexandre Vinet

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. – E.M. Forster

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture. –   Simonides

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

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.” – Søren Kierkegaard

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. – Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Poetry is the deification of reality. – Edith Sitwell

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. – Alfred de Musse

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event. –  Robert Lowell

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

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. – William Wordsworth

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth. – Edgar Allan Poe

The word “Verse” is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification… the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. – Edgar Allan Poe

A poem should not mean / But be. – Archibald MacLeish

Breathe-in experience, / breathe-out poetry. – Muriel Rukeyser

Compression of poetry is so great I often explode. Out of the house to walk off a poem. – William Corbett

The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life. – Robert Penn Warren

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

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. – Ezra Pound

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T.S. Eliot

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. – Maxwell Bodenheim

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer’s shop. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

The language beneath the language: This is poetry.-   Andrea Pacione

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

In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace…. All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world. – Alexandre Vinet

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. – Robinson Jeffers

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

Carl Sandburg’s “Tentative (First Model): Definitions of Poetry”:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’

4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.