Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.” Years later, Marianne Moore (1887–1972) responded “or is it valid / to discriminate against ‘business documents and // school books.’” Instead, she called poems “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Tolstoy (1828–1910) noted in his diary, “Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) characterized poetry as “a revelation of words by means of the words.” George Santayana (1863–1952) said that “poetry is speech in which the instrument counts as well as the meaning.” But he also thought of it as something beyond “verbal expression,” as “that subtle fire and inward light which seems at times to shine through the world and to touch the images in our minds with ineffable beauty.” Yeats (1865–1939) loved Gavin Douglas’s 1553 definition of poetry as “pleasance and half wonder.” to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.” Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) characterized it as “speech framed. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) narrowed the definition to “a criticism of life.”Įzra Pound (1885–1972) later countered, “Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.” Shelley (1792–1822) joyfully called poetry “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” He said that poetry “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) followed up Wordsworth’s emphasis on overflowing emotion when he wrote that poetry is “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude.” Wordsworth (1771–1850) famously called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The baroque Jesuit poet Tomasso Ceva (1649–1737) said, “Poetry is a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”Ĭoleridge (1772–1834) claimed that poetry equals “the best words in the best order.” He characterized it as “that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) said that poetry is “a representing, counterfetting, a figuring foorth: to speak metaphorically: a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight.”īen Jonson (1572–1637) referred to the art of poetry as “the craft of making.” Poets (and others) have made many attempts over the centuries to account for poetry, an ancient and necessary instrument of our humanity:ĭante’s treatise on vernacular poetry, De vulgari eloquentia, suggests that around 1300, poetry was typically conceived of as a species of eloquence.

The Greek word poiesis means “making.” The fact that the oldest term for the poet means “maker” suggests that a poem is constructed. Poetrie (from the Latin poetria) entered fourteenth-century English vocabulary and evolved into our poetry. The word poesie entered the English language in the fourteenth century and begat poesy (as in Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy,” ca. There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures. Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.” Even Samuel Johnson maintained, “To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer.” Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it. The following definition of the term poetry is reprinted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch.Īn inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language an experience through words. Poetry is a form of writing vital to culture, art, and life.

Nectar definition poetry