Poetry is an art which appeals to man's sense, his awareness of and pleasure in beauty. Poetry creates beauty through rhythm and through sound through the pictures it produces, through the feelings it stimulates, through the thoughts it evokes, through the characters it portrays, through its special use of language, through what it says and what it leaves unsaid.
It would be better to refer to some of the important statements on poetry to get a clear idea of what a poem is:
The poet's eye, is a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
-William Shakespeare: A Mid-summer Night's Dream
Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.....The poet has not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experience combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.
_T.S. Eliot
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
_William Wordsworth
The poet is a man who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind.
_William Wordsworth
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
_S.T. Coleridge
It is important to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.
_Matthew Arnold
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.
_P.B. Shelley
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