Some people react physically to the magic of poetry. to the moments, that is, of authentic revelation, of the communication , the sharing, at its highest level... A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
-- Dylan Thomas --

Poetry is the voice of the spirit and imagination and all that is potential, as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the gods.
--Ted Hughes--

Poetry helps us understand common things better... Poetry will not teach us how to live well, but it will incite in us the wish to.
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It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity. We sense an ideal version when we read, and with it arm ourselves, to quarrel with reality.
--David Constantine--

My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about terrors of mass extinction, but the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighbourhood graveyard... In a sense these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.
--Sylvia Plath--

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge... Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
--Wordsworth--

It should strike the reader as a wording of his own heighest thoughts, and almost appear a rememberance.
--Keats--

I've learned that not all poetry lends itself to music--some thoughts need to be sung only against the silence. There are softer and less tangible parts of our selves that are so essential to peace, to openheartedness, to unfolding the vision and the spiritual realm of our lives, to exposing our souls.
-- Jewel --

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.
--Emily Dickinson--

Poetry is of course not to be defined by its uses. It may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are periodically .. needed; may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make people see the world afresh, or some new part of it. It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world. But to say all this is only to say what you know already, if you have felt poetry and thought about your feelings.
--T. S. Eliot--

Poetry can tell us what human beings are. It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how, miraculously, we can stand up.
--Maya Angelou--

Every new poem is like findinga new bride. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling.
--Stanley Kunitz--

Poetry is almost the instinct against death crystrallised.
--Miroslav Holub--