Horace

"Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind."

Thomas B. Macaulay

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

Novalis

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

Kahlil Gibran

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes."

Carl Sandburg

"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life."

William Hazlitt

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

Carl Sandburg

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

Charles Simic

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

Leonard Cohen

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

Rita Dove

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."

Plato

"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."

T. S. Eliot

"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 plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them."

Dennis Gabor

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

Marianne Moore

"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth."

Samuel Johnson

"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."

Carl Sandburg

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment."

Carl Sandburg

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

Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."

Edgar Allan Poe

"Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."

Carl Sandburg

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

Thomas Gray

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

Robert Frost

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

Robert Frost