Poetry is. . .  : Web Clippings Each entry is clipped from the internet. The arrows to the left link back to the source page. We may feel we know what a thing is, but have trouble defining it. That holds as true for poetry as it does for, say, love or electricity. The American poet Emily Dickinson, though shrinking from offering a definition of poetry, once confided in a letter, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." A well-known British poet, A.E. Housman, could identify poetry through a similar response. He said that he had to keep a close watch over his thoughts when he was shaving in the morning, for if a line of poetry strayed into his memory, a shiver raced down his spine and his skin would bristle so that his razor ceased to act. What is this thing that can so physically affect some persons?. . . -- Dan Rifenburgh, What is Poetry?, National Endowment for the Arts Poetry is the most compressed form of literature. Poetry is composed of carefully chosen words expressing great depth of meaning. Poetry uses specific devices such as connotation, sound, and rhythm to express the appropriate combination of meaning and emotion. -- English Works: Gallaudet University The writer artfully uses technique with the express purpose of getting you to feel what he or she wants you to feel. The poet manipulates emotions just as a composer may write a piece of music to evoke a particular mood. The composer orchestrates not only the instruments but also the listener. This is the case in poetry too. -- Learning Space . . .poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves. --Poetrymagic.co.uk To borrow a phrase, poetry is a riddle wrapped in an enigma swathed in a cardigan sweater… or something like that. It doesn't like your definitions and will shirk them at every turn. If you really want to know what poetry is, read it. Read it carefully. Pay attention. Read it out loud. Now read it again. -- Mark Flanagan, What is Poetry?, About.com Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics. -- Wikipedia From feeling and idea to language and form. The poem is not just a description of the world, but an embodiment of it in language. The embodiment is (as that word suggests) complex, unique, stimulating to the senses. It is not only the music of the words, but their colour, feel, look, and association, the patterns they form, the structures of line, stanza, and book. Poetry says something by being that thing in words. -- Mike Ladd, What is Poetry Anyway, Poetica . . .A poem can be about anything at all: a mouse, a bat, a plum, a jar, a wind, a sigh, a thigh. But poetry is about what is eternal, and therefore about the fracture in time that is a single moment. Or say it the other way around: poetry is about impingements on the senses, including the sense of innerness, and is therefore about what the senses, including the sense of innerness, cannot grasp in the outer oceans of Being. . . -- Cynthia Ozick, Keynote Address, Academy of American Poet's Awards Ceremony 1996 Poetry is an art form in which 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. It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. Because of its nature of emphasizing linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another. -- harayana-online.com <-- { click on the arrow to see the quotes } The following quotations appeared on the:  New-Poetry mailing list New-Poetry@wiz.cath.vt.edu http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry under the thread: What is poetry? Contributors: James Finnegan, Thom Tammaro (Moorhead, MN), Helen Ruggieri, Halvard Johnson, Marcus Bales, James Alexander, Tad Richards, Richard Dillon and Laura Heidy. -- Fiera Lingue I suggest a more prosaic definition, so to speak: a poem is what scans. -- Aaron Haspel, God of the Machine Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous dictum, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best words in their best order." This last is the definition that most pleases me. Now all we have to do is agree on what we mean by the "best words" and the "best order" and we're laughing. -- Billy Mills, theblog books Another long list of quotes from poets.  -- Warren Wilosn College Well poetry is humanity’s answer to mortality. I mean if you had to talk about what poetry is about – what all poetry is about – it’s about time and mortality. . . -- Dana Gioia, Video on BigThink . . .the poem identifies itself musically in language. Poems have a different music from ordinary language and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come. Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens. The music never comes and then the poem never happens. -- C.K. Williams, Transcript of an interview with Jeffry Brown.