Quotes & Sayings About The Definition Of Poetry

Birds shouldn't be able to find tears
They are the definition of freedom — Maddy Kobar

Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger. — G.C. Waldrep III

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world. — Beaumont Newhall

Poetry ~~ No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requistions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought. — Henry David Thoreau

Written soul is called poetry — Munia Khan

No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. — Henry David Thoreau

Death is the end of the poetry we call life. — Debasish Mridha

Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition. — Campbell McGrath

I was really into communal living and we were all /
such free spirits, crossing the country we were /
nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class ... and it's just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they're all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i'd love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i've been cooking / for y'all but i've got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok? — Michelle Tea

[Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry]
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. — Marianne Moore

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds. — Robert Frost

To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything. — Yvor Winters

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there's just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What'sToCome. — Charles Wright

Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words. — Debasish Mridha

She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply! — Avijeet Das

So you will meet many 'someones' who will give a new definition to your name.
And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don't hide,
because if you ask me about hurt
and love
I will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it.
Don't be scared. Go. Love. — Charlotte Eriksson

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar. — David Whyte

Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to "get it" for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball. — John McWhorter

Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness. — Alena Graedon

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that. — Dylan Thomas

[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality ... a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns. — Robert Hayden

History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different "truths." Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history. — Robert Silverberg

I will not impress you with words, I will prove to you their definition. It's a genuine vocabulary. — Soar

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose
"a power to accomplish all that we undertake;" for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry, Pope in painting, Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men. — Charles Caleb Colton

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? — Lucy Grealy

I know certainly, for instance, it's part of the black aesthetic, the whole concept of art as business, art for art's sake, art as the competitive gesture, I connect with a very male-oriented concept of living, as opposed to, and we would call them alternate aesthetics, which include the black aesthetic, the feminist aesthetic, where art and poetry become part and parcel of one's daily living, one's daily expression, the need to communicate, the need to share one's feelings, to develop within oneself the best that is possible. And the definition of art as betterment, I think, is a mainstay of the alternative aesthetics. — Audre Lorde

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form. — Robert Morgan

All war is based in deception (cfr. Sun Tzu, "The Art of War").
Definition of deception: "The practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device entended to deceive somebody".
Thus, all war is based in metaphor.
All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry.
Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction.
Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction, and seduction is the nature of war. — Pola Oloixarac

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. — Thom Gunn

We all know what good writing is: It's the novel we can't put down, the poem we never forget, the speech that changes the way we look at the world. It's the article that tells us when, where, and how, the essay that clarifies what was hazy before. Good writing is the memo that gets action, the letter that says what a phone call can't. It's the movie that makes us cry, the TV show that makes us laugh, the lyrics to the song we can't stop singing, the advertisement that makes us buy. Good writing can take form in prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. It can be formal or informal, literary or colloquial. The rules and tools for achieving each are different, but one difficult-to-define quality runs through them all: style. "Effectiveness of assertion" was George Bernard Shaw's definition of style. "Proper words in proper places" was Jonathan Swift's. You — Mitchell Ivers

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work
like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work ... Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos. — P.K. Page

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me. — Grace Paley

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. — Randall Jarrell

The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things. — Robert D. Richardson

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order. — Julio Cortazar

We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object. — C.S. Lewis

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap. — Peter Steele