1. William Wordsworth
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."
(Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802)
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."
(A Defence of Poetry, 1821)
3. John Keats
"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."
(From a letter to John Taylor, 1818)
4. T.S. Eliot
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."
(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Poetry: the best words in the best order."
(Biographia Literaria, 1817)
6. Robert Frost
"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
(Interview, 1960)
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What is Poetry