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Home > From A Poet's Glossary: Poetry
W. B. Yeats (18651939) loved Gavin Douglass 1553 definition of poetry as pleasance and half
wonder.
George Santayana (18631952) said that poetry is speech in which the instrument counts as
well as the meaning. But he also thought of it as something beyond verbal expression, as that
subtle fire and inward light which seems at times to shine through the world and to touch the
images in our minds with ineffable beauty.
Wallace Stevens (18791955) characterized poetry as a revelation of words by means of the
words.
Tolstoy (18281910) noted in his diary, Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is
everything with the exception of business documents and school books. Years later, Marianne
Moore (18871972) responded [N]or is it valid / to discriminate against business documents
and // school books. Instead, she called poems imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
Gertrude Stein (18741946) decided, Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and
pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.
Robert Frost (18741963) said wryly, Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one
thing and meaning another.
Robert Graves (18951985) thought of it as a form of stored magic, Andre Breton (18961966)
as a room of marvels.
Howard Nemerov (19201991) said that poetry is simply getting something right in language.
Joseph Brodsky (19401996) described poetry as accelerated thinking, Seamus Heaney
(19392013) called it language in orbit.
Poetry seems at core a verbal transaction. In its oral form, it establishes a relationship between
a speaker and a listener; in its written form, it establishes a relationship between a writer and a
reader. Yet at times that relationship seems to go beyond words. John Keats (17951821) felt
that Poetry should . . . strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear
almost a Remembrance. The Australian poet Les Murray (b. 1938) argues that poetry exists to
provide the poetic experience. That experience is a temporary possession. We know it by
contact, since it has an intensity that cannot be denied.
Emily Dickinson (18301886) wrote in an 1870 letter:
If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever 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. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
A. E. Housman wrote in The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933):
A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I
would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can
define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which
it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with another
object by Eliphaz the Termanite: 'A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh
stood up.' Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch
over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles
so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver
down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a
precipitation of water in the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by
borrowing a phrase from one of Keats last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny
Brawne, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.'
Excerpted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.