It is similarly impossible to find the exact definition of poetry anywhere. As per its versatility, everyone can try and come up with their own definitions based on how they see the piece of art. Poetry is a body made up of so many different composures and ingredients. To this, everyone is free to design or paint individual definitions for poetry. Writing a poem doesn’t guarantee your overall understanding of the term ‘poetry’. Some write for fun but do not really understand what they are even writing; yes it happens. When writing a poem, you might’ve asked yourself about the overall purpose, meaning, form and origin of what you’re writing. Most writers do not follow any sequence to write their poems, they just sit, think and write.
So you should know, poetry has no rule for writing unless it’s purposeful or you want to give it a specific image or shape. Poems could be anything you write. People keep details, stories, occurrences, ideas and journals about what come around them and try conjoining them as a poem. All of these are inclusive just as poetry is broad. Through the writing, one feels a rhythmic flow of the language that feels so good serving as a motivation or fuel to mount up the piece of art.
Here are some popular definitions of poetry according to some famous, well established and prolific writers from the ancient to modern days of poetry writing.
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Table of Contents
Different Definitions Of Poetry
Below are some variety of definitions of poetry as defined by popular and prolific poetry writers in history.
Definitions About the Power & Beauty of Language
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” —Audre Lorde
“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.” —Matthew Arnold
“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.” —Paul Engle
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” —Rita Dove
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Poetry is eternal graffitti written in the heart of everyone.” —Lawrence Ferlenghetti
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself.” —William Hazlitt
“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and self-discovery.” —Derek Walcott
Poetry Definitions With Words
“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” —Thomas Gray
“Poetry is movement; words shifting around within the writer’s soul, coming together in harmonious messages, which move into the reader’s soul.” —Janshares
“Poetry; the best words in the best order.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“. . . of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: memorable speech.” —W.H. Auden
“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.” —Dana Goia
Definitions About Feelings
“. . . it is through poetry that we give a name to those ideas which are – until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” —Audre Lord
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” —William Wordsworth
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” —Emily Dickinson
“The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.” —Jane Kenyon
“. . . the essence of poetry is still an interplay of thought and feeling expressed through the sound and rhythm of language.” —Neil Astley
“Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself.” —John Stuart Mill
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” —Leonardo da Vinci
“Poetry takes as its purview what is deeply felt and is essentially unsayable; that is the paradox on which the poem necessarily turns.” —Meena Alexander
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Definitions Merging With Metaphor/Simile
“Poetry is the fox under our shirts that gnaws away at our hearts. Outside we stand firm, inside, we are altered forever.” —Charles Wright
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” —Mary Oliver
“The blood jet is poetry/There is no stopping it.” —Sylvia Plath
“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brush fire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world.” —Jasper Fforde
“Poetry = Anger x Imagination” —Sherman Alexie
“I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.” —John Ashbery
“It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem.” —Sylvia Plath
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” —Stephen Mallarme
“Poetry is a gentle river flowing through a rocky and mountainous landscape of prose.” —Jodah
“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.” —Carl Sandburg
“Poetry is a zoo in which you keep demons and angels.” —Les Murray
“Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.” —Pablo Neruda
“Poetry is like making a joke. if you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.” —W.S. Merwin
“Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” —Adrienne Rich
“Poetry is a quiver on the skin of eternity.” —Lawrence Ferlenghetti
Definitions About Humanity
“The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.” —Dylan Thomas
“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.” —Paul Muldoon
“Poetry must find its primary impetus in local conditions.” —William Carlos Williams
“Poetry is, to put it mildly, a useful thing if, when reading it, we sense a better way of being in the world.” —David Constantine
“Poetry can tell us what human beings are. It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how, miraculously, we can stand up.” —Maya AngelouMaya Angelou
“Poetry is a brilliant vibrating interface between the human and the non-human.” —Edwin Morgan
“Every new poem is like finding a new bride. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling.” —Stanley Kunitz
“Poetry is a way of talking about things that frighten you.” —Mick Imlah
“This is one sense of poetry. A little concoction of words against death. It’s almost the instinct against death crystallized.” —Miroslav Holub
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” —Gustave Flaubert
“I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.” —Sylvia Plath
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” —W.B.Yeats
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Definitions About Mystery & Wonder
“The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name. —William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
“There is poetry when we realize that we possess nothing.” —John Cage
“Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” —Lucille Clifton
“Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.” —Nathalie Sarrante
“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.” —Charles Bukowski
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” —T.S. Eliot
“A poem should not mean/But be.” —Archibald McLeish
“What can be explained is not poetry.” —W.B. Yeats
“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” —Michael Longley
“There is a mystery and a surprise and after that a great deal of hard work.” —Elizabeth Bishop
“Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced.” —Christopher Logue
“Poetry is the imponderable.” —Charles Simic
“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” —Marianne Moore
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Definitions About Journey
“What we want from poetry is to be moved, to be moved from where we now stand.” —James Tate
“A poem should take you somewhere different….a poet should be the one least likely to step into the same river twice.” —Seamus Heaney
“Good poets are the explorers of the world. Out on the frontiers, they send back bulletins.” —Eamon Grennan
Definition About Truth
“Poetry is truth seen with passion.” —W.B.Yeats
“A poem is an approach towards a truth.” —Kathleen Jamie
“Poems don’t have to tell the truth, but they have to be true to themselves.” —Simon Armitage
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Definitions About One’s Spirit/Soul
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.” —Muriel Rukeyser
“Poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.” —Ted Hughes
“Poetry speaks to something in us that so wants to be filled. It speaks to the great hunger of the soul.” —Lucille Clifton
“Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves.” —Edward Hirsch
“Poetry is indeed something divine.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Poetry has to do with the non rational parts of man. For a poet, a human being is a mystery. This is a religious feeling.” —Czeslaw Milosz
“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.” —Edgar Allan Poe
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” —Wallace Stevens
“The magic virtue of a poem consists in being always daemon ridden so that it baptises with dark water those who look at it. The daemon? Where is the daemon?” —Federico Garcia Lorca
“Poetry says more about the psychic life of an age than any other art.” —Charles Simic
“Sometimes a poem can change people’s lives, strengthen and focus people’s beliefs.” —Adrian Mitchell
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” —Novalis
“Poetry is the oxygen of the soul.” —Romeos Quill
“If you listen, the Universe sings with majesty to its own rhapsodies.” —Manatita44
Other Definitions From Colleagues Poets
“Poetry is the mind, body and soul coming together to say what the heart feels.” —JThomp42
“Poetry . . . is the flow of innate feeling through some tuned syllables.” —Venkatachari M
“If there is one thing I have learned about writing poems, it is that they are never done. Years pass, they sit unfinished. Like children, I always want t help them.” —GNelson
“Poetry is a distillation of words and life.” —Snakeslane
The above definitions of poetry very well explain what beauty and nature poetry is in the mind of these prolific poets in history.
