Poetry . . . is an art of imitation . . . a speaking picture, with this end—to teach and delight.
Sir Phillip Sidney
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling; it takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
Poetry is the lava of imagination whose eruption prevents earthquake.
Lord Byron
Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I would define . . . the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language.
Watts-Dunton
Poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.
Matthew Arnold