Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

poetry is a way of seeing and that a poet is not so much a person skilled with words as a person who recognizes the poetry that exists all the time all around us.

Poetry is music for the human voice. Until you actually speak it or someone speaks it, it has not come into its own.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.