William Wordsworth from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind.
John Keats from a letter (1818)
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess . . . it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance. . . . If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
Percy Shelley from A Defence of Poetry (1821)
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be the `expression of the imagination.'
[Poetry's] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts. . . .
Poetry awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight. . . . Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred.
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say I will compose poetry. . . . For the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence., like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. . . The most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of divinity in man.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
W.H. Auden from The Dyer’s Hand (1956)
The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage this rite must be beautiful. . . . Poetry can do a hundred things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct--it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.
Seamus Heaney from The Government of the Tongue (1986)
Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. . . . Poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being summoned and released.