Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
‐‐ Jonathan Galassi
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.
‐‐ Tahar Ben Jelloun
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
‐‐ Audre Lorde
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
‐‐ John Denham
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
‐‐ David Whyte
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
‐‐ Mary Oliver
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
‐‐ Gaston Bachelard
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
‐‐ Tom Holt
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
‐‐ Felix Dennis
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
‐‐ Paul Engle
Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.
‐‐ Edwin Morgan
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
‐‐ Dennis Gabor
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
‐‐ Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.
‐‐ Caroline Kennedy
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
‐‐ Jonathan Galassi
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
‐‐ Matthew Arnold
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
‐‐ Russell Baker
Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.
‐‐ Daniel Radcliffe
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
‐‐ Mark Strand
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
‐‐ James Russell Lowell
Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
‐‐ Orson F. Whitney
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
‐‐ Marianne Moore
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
‐‐ Edmund Burke
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
‐‐ Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
‐‐ Eugenio Montale
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
‐‐ John Drinkwater
Poetry is the deification of reality.
‐‐ Edith Sitwell
Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
‐‐ Orson F. Whitney
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
‐‐ Octavio Paz
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
‐‐ Joseph Roux
Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.
‐‐ Steve Earle
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
‐‐ David Hare
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
‐‐ Erica Jong
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
‐‐ Alice Walker
Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
‐‐ Ellen Bass
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
‐‐ Terry Eagleton
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
‐‐ Johann Georg Hamann
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
‐‐ Allen Ginsberg
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
‐‐ Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
‐‐ Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
‐‐ Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
‐‐ Edwin Hubbel Chapin
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
‐‐ Lascelles Abercrombie
Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.
‐‐ Robin Coste Lewis
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
‐‐ Thomas Gray
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
‐‐ Joseph Roux
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
‐‐ Robert Frost
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
‐‐ Donald Hall