WHAT IS POETRY?

 

               

                                                                WHAT IS POETRY?

1.     Poetry is the language of the heart, the mind, and he soul. It expresses deep feelings and sublimest thoughts both realistically and imaginatively.  Its medium is metrically expressed music.   It covers all the scenes and sights of earthly and heavenly life in the best possible words.  Nothing is outside of its beautiful pale and panorama.  

2.     The English poet and playwtight William  Shakespeare (1564-1616) says in his play Midsummer Night’s Dream:      

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is the madman; the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

    

3.     The Greek philosopher Plato said: Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

4.     According to the American journalist Gamallel  Bailey (1807-1859) : Poetry is itself a thing of God. He made his prophets poets and the more we feel of poesie do we become like God in love and power.

     

5.     Here are a few short definitions of poetry:

(a). Poetry is emotion put into measure,--English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. (b). Poetry is the language of the imagination and passions.---English essayist William Hazlitt. (c). Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ---English poet and playwright Christopher Fry. (d). Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings : it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.---English poet William Wordsworth. (e). Poetry is what gets lost in translation.---American poet Robert Frost. (f) A good poem is a contribution to reality.---Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet and writer. (g). Poetry is not turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.---T. S. Eliot,  American poet and playwright .(h). Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.---English writer Samuel Johnson. (i). Poetry is the best words in the best order.---English poet S.T.Coleridge. (j). If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.---English poet John Keats.

                                                                        *****

G.R.Kanwal

10 June 2026