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
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T.S. Eliot
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things
Matthew Arnold
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing
Edmund Burke
All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears
Alfred Douglas
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility
William Wordsworth
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
Voltaire