The following quotations appeared on the:

 

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under the thread: What is poetry?

Contributors: James Finnegan, Thom Tammaro (Moorhead, MN), Helen Ruggieri, Halvard Johnson, Marcus Bales, James Alexander, Tad Richards, Richard Dillon, Laura Heidy and Jeff Newberry.

 

Things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful.
Dante

The art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Samuel Johnson

The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
William Wordsworth

Musical thought
Thomas Carlyle

Emotion put into measure.
Thomas Hardy

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

Speech framed...to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest and meaning.
Gerard Manley Hopkins 

A way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.
Robert Frost 

A revelation in words by means of the words.
Wallace Stevens 

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

Mina Loy, "Modern Poetry", 1925

Not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
T. S. Eliot

The clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden

The body of linguistic constructions that men usually refer to as poems.
J. V. Cunningham

Hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.
Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry is life distilled.

Gwendolyn Brooks

A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious.
Robert Bly

Poetry is the synthesis of hyancinths and bisquits.

Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Edith Sitwell

The story of a soul.

Czeslaw Milosz

Getting something right in  language

Howard Nemerov

Poetry is the great stimulation of life... Poetry is redemption from pessimism.
Susan Howe

 

A poem is anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of attention.
William Stafford

I would define poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe

Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.
S. T. Coleridge

... the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion of the imagination...
Macaulay

...the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds...
Shelley

...speech framed...to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning...
Gerard Manley Hopkins

...the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from and overclothed blindness to a naked vision...
Dylan Thomas

...language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that can not be said...
E. A. Robinson

...the art of saying everything and reducing it to nothing...
Barbara Hyett

POEM: a composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense of experience, characterized by the use of condensed language chosen for its sound and suggestive power as well as its meaning, and by the use of such literary techniques as structured meter, natural cadences, rhyme, or metaphor.
American Heritage Dictionary

A poem is "a sonorous molded shape of form".
Osip Mandelstam

... a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcyle...
W. H. Auden

Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.
Joseph Brodsky

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.
Charles Simic

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it... by way of the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.
Charles Olson

 

Prose goes all the way to the margin, poetry doesn't.
...

A momentary stay against confusion.

Robert Frost

 

Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur
Lewis Carroll

 

Poetry is sense, sensed.
Wendy Battin

Poetry is not prosody. It is not technique. Poetry is born out of revelation to one's self of the meaning of your own life.
Stanley Kunitz

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

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Shelley

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
William Butler Yeats

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo

 

It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry.  One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.

Philip Sidney ~Apologie for Poetrie~

What is poetry?  Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not.  We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson ~Boswell's Life~

 

Poetry is, if nothing else, the validation of the "elsewhere" and returning it to a happening "here" - in text or other inscription.
Todd Swift

 

In science one tries to tell people, in 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

 

POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.
Ambrose Bierce

 

I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature.

Neruda

Poetry is what birds would do far better than we if they could play tennis.

Bob Grumman

 

... we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a glint of that unlimited vastness.
Italo Calvino, 1985

 

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
John Ruskin 1819-1900

Sir, what is poetry?'
Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.'
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost 1874-1963

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth 1770-1850

Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.
John Keats 1795-1821

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A.E. Housman 1859-1936

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope 1863-1933

Poetry should surprise by fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him.
John Keats 1795-1821

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
Owen Meredith, Earl of Lytton 1981-1891

 

Most people have so vague an idea of poetry that their vagueness on their score serves as their definition of poetry

--Paul Valéry, Littérature (1930)

 

Poetry proves again and again that any single overall theory of anything doesn't work.  Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written.

Charles Simic, ~A Fly in the Soup~

It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poetry.  One may be a poet without versing, and a versifyer without poetry.

Philip Sidney, ~Apologie for Poetrie~

What is poetry?  Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Samuel Johnson ~Boswell's Life~

The question of what poetry communicates, if anything, has been largely forced upon us by the advent of 'modern' poetry.  Some of that poetry is admittedly highly difficult - a very great deal of it is bound to appear difficult to the reader of conventional reading habits, even in spite of the fact - actually, in many cases, because of the fact - that he is a professor of literature.  –

Cleanth Brooks ~The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry~

 

Poetry is a way of mind; the exploration of a tunnel, where blind albino fish seem to float in nostalgic pools of unremembered memory.
Russell Edson.

 

Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls--and somehow stands for--everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.

Italo Calvino

 

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book

 

Poetry, as we use the word, is a surrender to the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

James Finnegan

 

Poetry is a Mercurial state of language into which verse or prose or any verbal amalgam may turn.

Richard Dillon

 

What makes us so fond of (the prose poem) is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition....Prose poems cannot be perfected, they are not literary constructions...prose poems have no place to go.  Abundance and spontaneity; spontaneous abundance in imitation of the joy and energy of general creation and substance.

Russell Edson

 

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality know what it means to want to escape these things.

T.S. Eliot

 

Poetry is the great art of constructing transcendental health. Hence the poet is the transcendental physician. [122]
Novalis, Pollen and Fragments, translated by Arthur Versluis
(Phanes Press, 1989)

 

Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment.  An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolution by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation.  Poetry reveals this world; it creates another.  Bread of the chosen; accursed food.  It isolates; it unites.  Invitation to the journey; return to the homeland.  Inspiration, respiration, muscular exercise.  Prayer to the void, dialogue with absence; tedium, anguish, and despair nourish it.  Prayer, litany, epiphany, presence.  Exorcism, conjuration, magic.  Sublimation, compensation, condensation of the unconscious.  Historic expression of races, nations, classes. It denies history:  at its core all objective conflicts are resolved and man at last acquires consciousness of being something more than a transient.  Experience, feeling, emotion, intuition, undirected thought.  Result of chance; fruit of calculation.  Art of speaking in a superior way; primitive language.  Obedience to the rules; creation of others.  Imitation of the ancients, copy of the real, copy of a copy of the Idea.  Madness, ecstasy, logos.  Return to childhood, coitus, nostalgia for paradise, for hell, for limbo.  Play, work, ascetic activity.  Confession. Innate experience.  Vision, music, symbol.

Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre
 

 

 

 

                       By James Finnegan:

 

Here are some things I pulled out of a little book called, George Oppen-A Radical Practice by Susan Thackrey, O Books, 2001…

 

“George Oppen ceased to write poetry from this point [1935, the year he joined the Communist Party] until 1958, for many reasons, not the least being that he did not want to write propaganda, to describe what was ‘already determined before the verse.’ (SL, p. 22) He also said that ‘he didn’t know what the world was,’ and couldn’t find it in the poetry then being written.” (Hatlen & Mandel, “Poetry & Politics: A Conversation with George and Mary Oppen,” George Oppen: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation, 1981)

 

“In 1958 Oppen, after dreaming that he did not want to rust, began to write poetry again.”

 

& some Oppen quotes from her book…

 

“…suppose, instead of an ‘instant archeology’ that imagines a personification of things already known, one imagines the first objects to become object to living consciousness—their force is that among sensations they emerged as objects—can we suppose, in the history of the Sacred, a greater moment   ? this is the ground the poem’s meant to stand on.” –George Oppen,  Selected Letters, p. 248

 

“I think that poetry…must be made out of the clarity of the perceptions, of emotion as the ability to perceive.” –George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 40, 1960 to Cid Corman

 

“there are things we believe or think we believe or want to believe which will not substantiate themselves in the concrete material of the poem.”—George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 287, to John Taggart

 

“Words cannot be wholly transparent…in despair, so many turn to ‘the machine of words’ and arrive, if anywhere, at the Hermetic…the ‘machine of words’ which resolves everything—until one steps out the door.” –George Oppen, Selected Letter, pp. 144-145

”I think that poetry which is of any value is always revelatory. Not that it reveals or could reveal Everything, but it must reveal something…and for the first time…it is a knowledge which is hard to hold, it is held in the poem, a meaning grasped again on re-reading. ”—George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 133

 

"I don't mean…that I'm trying to elaborate a philosophy in a poem: I mean that that these thoughts are part of one's feeling about everything--it can't just be kept out, except by the purest artiness." George Oppen, Selected Letters, pp. 18-19

 

Just don't rust,

Finnegan

 

 

James Finnegan lives in West Hartford CT. Poetry is for him an obsession rather than a profession. He works in the field of financial institution insurance. Infrequently, his poems have appeared in literary journals. In 2001 he founded the NewPoetry List:
http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry