Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

There is poetry even in prose in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

That sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice was then in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things which ponders listens penetrates where the earlier less developed consciousness passed lightly by is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

The lines of poetry the period of prose and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

That is to say epic poetry has been invented many times and independently but as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar so the invention itself has been.

By the general process of epic poetry I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

A theology should be like poetry which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations the same hopes and fears to which the Bible addresses itself it might rival it in distribution.

I've written for every medium except poetry at which I suck.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness vigor and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical of that one philological of a third rhetorical and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.