Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.

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 rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Poetry is life distilled. –

Poetry comes out of life.

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 a potent tool capable of guiding societies worldwide through its invisible aesthetic strength.

Poetry is essential in the human being, is part of the human essence we all share.

Poetry is a means of storing power: notably the magical power of love.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.

Poetry has always been the ignition for everything. It’s what ignites my brain, lights the imaginative forces. If poetry didn’t exist, I’d be doing something else entirely. That’s how crucial it is to me. For pleasure, for work, to get started in the day—I read poetry. And it’s the last thing I read at night. It fuels my dreams.

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.

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 the art of uniting pleasure with truth.