NPM: What is Poetry?

The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility. –William Wordsworth

The art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors. –Thomas Macaulay

What ideas feel like. –Karl Shapiro

The art that offers depth in a moment. –Molly Peacock

Memorable speech. –W.H. Auden

Perfection of form united with a significance of feeling. –T.S. Eliot

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. --Harold Bloom in The Best Poems of the English Language

This, I believe is the ultimate direction and goal of poetry, metaphor, and symbol—to express what is inexpressible, to fuse together what still remains separate. --Robert Siegel, The Christian Imagination, 351