Poetry and its 50 Definitions

What is poetry and its 50 definitions

       Why is it that everyone can identify poetry, but no one can define it? No matter how comprehensive the description, there is always a poem that doesn’t quite fit the given parameters. And yet, despite its many forms and styles, many people have a firm idea that they do or don’t like poetry. This is often based on exposure to a very few examples, and often in a coercive setting (i.e. school!). What kind of poetic expression speaks to you? Is it possible that one you haven’t met yet will do the trick?

         Below is a list of definitions of poetry that I’ve come across, in no particular order. No. 50 is my own definition. Please feel free to use Comments to suggest others—your own or anyone else’s (please only give definitions of “poetry” or “poem”—not “poet” or other related items!). Ultimately, I’ll compile a resource page with the final results and acknowledge any contributions that usefully expand this list.

·        Poem n. a composition in meter: a composition of high beauty of thought or language and artistic form, in verse or prose: a creation, achievement, etc, marked by beauty or artistry.

·        Poetry is emotion put into measure.

·        Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.

·        … not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry.

·        Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.

·        Poetry is a rhythmical form of words which express an imaginative-emotional-intellectual experience of the writer’s…in such a way that it creates a similar experience in the mind of his reader or listener.

·        Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.

·        (Poetry is) literature in metrical form: any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling.

·        Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

·        Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

·        Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.

·        (Poetry is) a kind of ingenious nonsense.

·        (Poetry is) a literary expression in which words are used in a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an emotional response.

·        Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

·        A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.

·        Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

·        A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

·        Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

·        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.

·        Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

·        (Poetry) is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

·        Poetry is the deification of reality.

·        Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get; they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.

·        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.

·        Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

·        Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

·        Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

·        (Poetry is) texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter and more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama.

·        Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

·        Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

·        Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

·        Poetry is basically anything that calls itself a poem.

·        Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

·        Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

·        Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

·        Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

·        (Poetry is) an imaginative response to experience reflecting a keen awareness of language. Its first characteristic is rhythm, marked by regularity far surpassing that of prose. Poetry’s rhyme affords an obvious difference from prose. Because poetry is relatively short, it is likely to be characterized by compactness and intense unity. Poetry insists on the specific and the concrete.

·        Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

·        Poetry should… strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

·        Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

·        Poetry: the best words in the best order.

·        The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

·        Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

·        Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

·        Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

·        There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

·        Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

·        Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

·        The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life.

·        Poetry is an attempt to capture the essence of the chord struck in the poet by an instant of insight, in such a way that the same music will sound in the soul of the reader.