What is Poetry?

The Greek word poiesis means “making.” 

• Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it.  It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.”  
• Joseph Brodsky described poetry as “accelerated thinking."
• Seamus Heaney  called it “language in orbit.”
• Coleridge claimed that poetry equals “the best words in the best order.”
• Gertrude Stein decided, “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.”
• George Santayana said that “poetry is speech in which the instrument counts as well as the meaning.” 
• Paul Valery said the difference between poetry and prose is physiological.  
• Marianne Moore says it like this: 

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "Lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.