Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

Poetry is the image of man and nature

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.

Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.

poetry is about truth, about revealing something of our human nature and about the world.

The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of Humanity and Nature — the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

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

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different.

Poetry is usually concerned with what is universal and unchanging in human life; novels necessarily with much that is local and ephemeral. Moreover poetry, almost like music, transcends the limitations of time by appealing to our emotions through our basic primitive sense of rhythm and harmony.

Great poems are all fables about life.

The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.