Poetic Definitions of Poetry and Poets

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

—Emily Dickinson

What exactly is a poet? What should poetry do? Throughout history, many writers have tried to answer these questions, and few of them agree. Here is a sampling of poets, philosophers, novelists, essayists, historians, professors, journalists, musicians, actors, and playwrights and their answers.

What is poetry?

• “vocal painting” (Simonides)
• “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn” (Thomas Gray)
• “musical Thought” (Thomas Carlyle)
• “true dreams interpreted” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• “radically, a cry” (Walter J. Ong)
• “forged slowly and patiently link by link with sweat and blood and tears” (Alfred Douglas)
• “talking on tiptoe” (Harold Frederic)
• “a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses” (Vicente Aleixandre)
• “not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.” (Allen Ginsberg)
• “a way of taking life by the throat” (Robert Frost)
• “an unburned picture in the ashes” (J. J. Murray)

What is a poet?

• “the mirror of humanity” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• “before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language … a professional maker of verbal objects” (W. H. Auden)
• “[one] who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times” (Randall Jarrell)
• “produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real” (Simone Veil)
• “a recording chief-inquisitor” (Robert Browning)
• “somebody to whom things made matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making” (e e cummings)
• “a priest … As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family” (Gustave Flaubert)
• “anyone who wouldn’t call himself a poet” (Bob Dylan)
• “[one who] looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman … the priest of the invisible” (Wallace Stevens)
• “an inner émigré, grown long-haired” (Seamus Heaney)
• “a madman lost in adventure” (Paul Verlaine)
• “[one who] can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture” (Helen Hayes)
• “a liar who always speaks the truth” (Jean Cocteau)
• “someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning” (James Dickey)

What should a poem do?

• “make nothing happen” (W. B. Yeats)
• “express what we all feel … Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.” (John Lennon)
• “examine, not the individual, but the species” (Samuel Johnson)
• “excite by elevating the soul” (Edgar Allan Poe)
• “[speak] not of peculiar and personal things, but of what … is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men” (Richard Wilbur)
• “put the infinite within the finite” (Robert Browning)
• “express the emotion of all the ages” (Thomas Hardy)
• “should be equal to/Not True …should not mean/But be” (Archibald MacLeish)