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

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
Eli Khamarov

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
Richard Rosen

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau