50 definitions of poetry by various poets and writers:
1. William Wordsworth: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Poetry: the best words in the best order."
3. Emily Dickinson: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."
4. Robert Frost: "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
5. T. S. Eliot: "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
6. John Keats: "Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul and does not startle or amaze with itself but with its subject."
7. Edgar Allan Poe: "Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
8. Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."
9. Matsuo Basho: "Poetry is a way of expressing and feeling things unseen."
10. Dylan Thomas: "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."
11. Walt Whitman: "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."
12. Rainer Maria Rilke: "Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement."
13. Pablo Neruda: "Poetry is an act of peace."
14. Sylvia Plath: "Poetry is the blood jet. There is no stopping it."
15. Wallace Stevens: "Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame."
16. W. H. Auden: "Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings."
17. Langston Hughes: "Poetry is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or lime, drop by drop, into atomic words."
18. E. E. Cummings: "A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words."
19. Oscar Wilde: "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
20. Charles Bukowski: "Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
21. Elizabeth Bishop: "Poetry is a way of thinking with one’s feelings."
22. Allen Ginsberg: "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind."
23. Muriel Rukeyser: "Poetry is the type of language that cannot be parodied because it is the source of parody."
24. Mark Strand: "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
25. Ezra Pound: "Poetry is news that stays news."
26. Seamus Heaney: "Poetry is language in orbit."
27. Adrienne Rich: "Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language."
28. Anne Sexton: "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness."
29. Jorge Luis Borges: "Poetry is the mysterious, inexplicable aspect of words."
30. W. B. Yeats: "A poet never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table."
31. Ted Hughes: "Poetry is a way of thinking about things."
32. Marianne Moore: "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."
33. Carl Sandburg: "Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."
34. Thomas Gray: "Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn."
35. Paul Valéry: "Poetry is to prose what dancing is to walking."
36. Amy Lowell: "Poetry is the articulation of a dream."
37. Victor Hugo: "Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."
38. Basho: "The essence of poetry is change."
39. Rita Dove: "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."
40. Gwendolyn Brooks: "Poetry is life distilled."
41. Shel Silverstein: "Poetry is a mystery, like a dream. But not quite."
42. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
43. Lord Byron: "Poetry is the lava of the imagination."
44. Stephen Spender: "Poetry is the struggle with the meaningless of life."
45. Octavio Paz: "Poetry is a means of making time audible."
46. John Dryden: "Poetry is a representation of human action."
47. Emily Brontë: "Poetry is the music made in the soul of the world."
48. John Ashbery: "Poetry is the realization of selfhood."
49. Philip Larkin: "Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are."
50. Rupi Kaur: "Poetry is what connects us and sets us free."
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