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

  ~Eli
Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

2. 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 Considered

3. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Shelley, A
Defence of Poetry, 1821

4. Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we
make poetry.  ~W.B. Yeats

5. Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.  ~Augustus William
Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

6. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.  ~Carl Sandburg

7. Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius
Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

8. It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around
things.  ~Stephen Mallarme

9. The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as
a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

10. Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis

11. The smell of ink is intoxicating to me — others may have wine, but I have poetry. ~Terri
Guillemets

12. To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman

13. Poetry is life distilled.  ~Gwendolyn Brooks

14. Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray

15. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.  ~Carl Sandburg

16. Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.  ~Edmund Burke
17. There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of
a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles
Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

18. Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. ~Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Highs by Alex J.
Packer

19. Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.  ~Maxwell Bodenheim

20. Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. 
~Leonard Cohen

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

22. Ink runs from the corners of my mouth

There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

23. There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.  ~Robert Graves,
1962 interview on BBC-TV

24. Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

25. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.  ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry,
"Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951