POETRY IS...

POETRY IS…

Poetry is not just matter of form, but a habit of insight...
          Molly McQuade

Poetry is a Dumb-Ass Spider.
           Lynda Barry

The next several are all from Wallace Stevens:

Poetry is a form of melancholia.

Poetry is not a personal matter.

Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry.

Poetry is the sum of its attributes.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.

Poetry is a metaphor.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language.

Poetry is a health.

Poetry is a cure of the mind.

Poetry is a response to the daily need of getting the world right.

Poetry is often a revelation of the elements of appearance.

Poetry constantly requires a new relation.

Poetry is a renovation of experience. Originality is an escape from repetition.

Poetry is reality and thought or feeling.

Poems are praise, and poems cannot end.
          William Jay Smith Independence Day

Poetry is the only verity- the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, not after the apparent.
          Emerson

Poetry is deep gossip.
          Liam Rector

Poetry--thank goodness—is the animal that always escapes.
          John Barr

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
          James Tate

Poetry is born out of the superfluity of language's own resources and energy. It's a kind of overdoing it. Enough is not enough when it comes to poetry.
          Seamus Heaney

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." 

          Percy B Shelley

Poetry is:

The rhythmic creation of beauty. Edgar Allen Poe

The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.  William Wordsworth 

Prose: words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of color.  Thomas Macaulay

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

What ideas feel like.  Karl Shapiro

No ideas but in things. William Carlos Williams

The art that offers depth in a moment.  Molly Peacock

Memorable speech.  W. H. Auden

Perfection of form united with a significance of feeling.  T. S. Eliot

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist
  till they are born . . . in poetry.  C. Day Lewis

Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.
           Jaan Kaplinski
           (trans. by Sam Hamill)

Poetry is the denial of death.
          Thomas Merton

Poetry is that species of composition which is opposed to works of
science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and
from all other species ... it is discriminated by proposing to itself
such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct
gratification from each component part. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
    

If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can
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)

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
              Marianne Boruch

Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.
              Charles Wright

"Poetry is an orphan of silence."

             Charles Simic