Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Plutarch

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 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