What is Poetry?

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What is Poetry?
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What is Poetry?

• A poem may appear to mean very different things
• to different readers, and all of these meanings
• may be different from what the author thought he
• meant. For instance, the author may have been
• writing some peculiar personal experience, which
• he saw quite unrelated to anything outside yet
• for the reader the poem may become the expression
• of a general situation, as well as of some
• private experience of his own. The readers
• interpretation may differ from the authors and
• be equally valid it may even be better. There
• may be more in a poem than the author was
• aware of. The different interpretations may all
• be partial formulations of one thing the
• ambiguities may be due to the fact that the poem
• means more, not less, than ordinary speech
• can communicate.
• T.S. Eliot

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What is a Poet?

• A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses
• his feelings through words.
• This may sound easy. It isnt.
• A lot of people think or believe or know they
• Feel but thats thinking or believing or
• knowing not feeling. And poetry is feeling
• not knowing or believing or thinking.
• Almost anybody can learn to think or believe
• or know, but not a single human being can be
• taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think
• or you believe or you know youre a lot of other
• people but the moment you feel, youre
• NOBODY_BUT_YOURSELF.
• E. E. Cummings

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• A poem begins with a lump in the throat
• Robert Frost
• Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
• Robert Frost
• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought
  and the thought has found words.
• Robert Frost
• Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their
  moments. The intervals are the tough things.
• Robert Frost
• I would as soon write free verse as play tennis
  with the net down.
• Robert Frost, 1935

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• Verse is not written, it is bled Out of the
  poet's
• abstract head. Words drip the poem on the
• page Out of his grief, delight and rage.
• Paul Engle

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• And your very flesh shall be a great
• poem. Walt Whitman

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

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

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• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
• Paul Valry

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• 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 packsack of invisible keepsakes.
• Carl Sandburg
• Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
• Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

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• Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
• Novalis

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• There is poetry as soon as we realize that we
  possess nothing.
• John Cage

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• The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
• Jean Cocteau

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• You can't write poetry on the computer.
• Quentin Tarantino

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

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• You don't have to suffer to be a poet.
  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
• John Ciardi,
• Simmons Review,
• Fall 1962

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• Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
• William Hazlitt

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• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything
  else is just a footnote. Yevgeny
  Yentushenko,
• The Sole Survivor, 1982

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• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is
  understood.
• T.S. Eliot,
• Dante, 1920

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• We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.
  We read and write poetry because we are members
  of the human race. And the human race is filled
  with passion. And medicine, law, business,
  engineering, these are noble pursuits and
  necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty,
  romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
• Dead Poet's Society

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• 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, Tradition and
  Individual Talent, 1919

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• 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, New York Times,
• 17 February 1957

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• A poem should not meanBut be. Archibald
  MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926

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• I grew up in this town, my poetry was born
  between the hill and the river, it took its voice
  from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped
  itself in the forests.
• Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street
  Journal,, 14 November 1985

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• Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of
  the same power of imagination, only that in the
  one case it is addressed to the head, in the
  other, to the heart.
• Thomas Hill

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• Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in
  words.
• Edgar Allan Poe

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• Id like to invite you into my poemPlease take
  off your shoes!
• Jay Frankston "When the Poet
• Sleepwalks Page 102, Muse Whispers
  Vol. 1