In the introduction to a treasured book of the past, A Treasury of the World’s Best Loved Poems (1961), readers are asked to ponder the question: “What is poetry?”
The introduction’s writer recalls the many and varied attempts at definition throughout the ages, citing poetry as:
- “the music of the soul” (Voltaire)
- “the art of uniting pleasure with truth” (Samuel Johnson)
- “the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself” (William Hazlitt)
- that which “makes me feel as if the top of my head were taken off” (Emily Dickinson)
- “not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us” (T.S. Eliot)
- Or as Albert Einstein said of truth, perhaps great poetry is “that which stands the test of experience.”