Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can’t be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love letters.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized.

It means handling words and images in an interesting way. All of us use words daily, unless of course we are the silent type. Everyday we say simple things like, "Gee, look at this tan of mine." Or: "I feel sort of sad." But say you wrote something like: "Our faces were the color of pennies," and "Our souls are broken like jars." The language becomes interesting and perks up our spirits and imagination. This is what poetry means—language that surprises and keeps us on our toes.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech.

Poetry is a literary art that deploys the aesthetic qualities and brevity of language to stir meanings that are literal and implied or imaginative through deliberate form and structure.

Poetry, as nearly as I can understand it, is a statement in words about a human experience, whether the experience be real or hypothetical, major or minor; but it is a statement of a particular kind. Words are symbols for concepts, and the philosopher or scientist endeavors as far as may be to use them with reference to nothing save their conceptual content. Most words, however, connote feelings and perceptions, and the poet, like the writer of imaginative prose, endeavors to use them with reference not only to their denotations but to their connotations as well. Such writers endeavor to communicate not only concepts, arranged, presumably, either in rational order or in an order of apprehensible by the rational mind, but the feeling or emotion which the rational content ought properly to arouse.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Poetry is a metaphysical blend with images of life, landscapes and noble delights of feelings and emotions. With a soul of power, the poet is dedicated to writing in his highest thoughts.

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

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.