Top 24 Poetry Definition Quotes
#1. I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
Grace Paley
#2. It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
Peter Steele
#3. [Marianne Moore's definition of genuine poetry]
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
Marianne Moore
#4. My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
#5. I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
Julio Cortazar
#6. If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.
Dylan Thomas
#7. Birds shouldn't be able to find tears
They are the definition of freedom
Maddy Kobar
#8. My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
Robert Frost
#9. Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition.
Campbell McGrath
#10. By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
David Whyte
#11. No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know.
Henry David Thoreau
#14. Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
Lucy Grealy
#15. Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
Robert Morgan
#16. Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words.
Debasish Mridha
#17. She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply!
Avijeet Das
#18. Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness.
Alena Graedon
#19. I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Randall Jarrell
#20. [My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality ... a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.
Robert Hayden
#21. A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#22. Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger.
G.C. Waldrep III
#23. Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
Beaumont Newhall
#24. I will not impress you with words, I will prove to you their definition. It's a genuine vocabulary.
Soar
