poetry

Also found in: Thesaurus, Medical, Acronyms, Idioms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Related to poetry: Poems

po·et·ry

(pō′ĭ-trē)

1. The act or practice of composing poems.

a. Poems regarded as forming a division of literature.

b. The poetic works of a given author, group, nation, or kind.

3. Literature written in meter; verse.

4. Prose that resembles a poem in some respect, as in vivid imagery or rhythmic sound.

5. The essence or characteristic quality of a poem: "It is impossible to separate the 'poetry' in Paradise Lost from the peculiar doctrines that it enshrines" (T.S. Eliot).

6. A quality that suggests poetry, as in grace, beauty, or harmony: the poetry of the dancer's movements.

[Middle English poetrie, from Old French, from Medieval Latin poētria, from Latin poēta, poet; see poet.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

poetry

(ˈpəʊɪtrɪ)

1. (Poetry) literature in metrical form; verse

2. (Poetry) the art or craft of writing verse

3. poetic qualities, spirit, or feeling in anything

4. anything resembling poetry in rhythm, beauty, etc

[C14: from Medieval Latin poētria, from Latin poēta poet]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

po•et•ry

(ˈpoʊ ɪ tri)

n.

1. literary work in metrical form; poetic works; poems; verse.

2. the art of writing poems.

3. prose with poetic qualities.

4. poetic qualities however manifested.

5. poetic spirit or feeling.

6. something suggestive of poetry.

[1350–1400; Middle English poetrie < Medieval Latin poētria poetic art, derivative of poēta poet]

poetry

found poem - A passage within prose that unintentionally reads like poetry.
stich - A line of poetry.
free verse - Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.
metrophobia - The fear of poetry.

Poets/Poetry

See Also: WRITERS/WRITING

All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure —Joseph Joubert
Composed poetry … like a dancer working at the barre, continually exercising the power of imagining, like a muscle that demanded flexing and stretching —Arthur A. Cohen
Explaining how you write poetry … it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife —Phillip Larkin
He [the poet] approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification —E. B. White
Like science, poetry must fix its thought in thing and symbol —Dilys Laing
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting —Robert Frost
Like marijuana smoke are poet’s verses —Jaroslav Seifert
Poems are like people … there are not many authentic ones around —Robert Graves
The poet is like the prince of the clouds who rides the tempest … exiled on the ground, amidst boos and insults, his giant’s wings prevent his walking —Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is like light —Delmore Schwartz
Poetry is like painting; one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance —Horace
Poetry … is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow —George Santayana
Poets … are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators —Karl Shapiro
The simile is taken from a prose poem entitled As You Say (not without sadness), Poets Don’t See They Feel It contains another simile which sheds light on the poet as one who strips away insulation: “He pulls at the seams [of insulation] like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half.”
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things —Robert Frost
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo —Don Marquis, The Sun Dial, 1878
Rhymes you as fast as a sailor will swear —Babette Deutsch
The simile is from a poem honoring John Skelton.
They [poets] are honored and ignored like famous dead Presidents —Delmore Schwartz
To try to read a poem with the eyes of the first reader who read it is like trying to see a landscape without the atmosphere that clothes it —W. Somerset Maugham
To write a lyric is like having a fit, you can’t have one when you wish you could … and you can’t help having it when it comes itself —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down —Robert Frost

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Switch to new thesaurus

Noun	1.	poetry - literature in metrical form poesy, verse hush, stillness, still - (poetic) tranquil silence; "the still of the night" epos - a body of poetry that conveys the traditions of a society by treating some epic theme literary genre, writing style, genre - a style of expressing yourself in writing epic poetry, heroic poetry - poetry celebrating the deeds of some hero dolor, dolour - (poetry) painful grief Erin - an early name of Ireland that is now used in poetry lyric - write lyrics for (a song) relyric - write new lyrics for (a song) rhyme, rime - compose rhymes tag - supply (blank verse or prose) with rhymes alliterate - use alliteration as a form of poetry poetise, poetize, verse, versify - compose verses or put into verse; "He versified the ancient saga" metrify - compose in poetic meter; "The bard metrified his poems very precisely" spondaise, spondaize - make spondaic; "spondaize verses" elegise, elegize - compose an elegy sonnet - compose a sonnet sonnet - praise in a sonnet scan - conform to a metrical pattern lyric - of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses emotion (often in a songlike way); "lyric poetry" sweet, sweetly - in an affectionate or loving manner (`sweet' is sometimes a poetic or informal variant of `sweetly'); "Susan Hayward plays the wife sharply and sweetly"; "how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank"- Shakespeare; "talking sweet to each other"
	2.	poetry - any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling expressive style, style - a way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period; "all the reporters were expected to adopt the style of the newspaper"

poetry

noun verse, poems, rhyme, rhyming, poesy (archaic), verse composition, metrical composition the poetry of Thomas Hardy

Quotations
"Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense" [Isaac Barrow]
"Poetry is what gets lost in translation" [Robert Frost]
"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen" [Fleur Adcock]
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" [William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (preface)]
"Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life" [Matthew Arnold Essays in Criticism]
"Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry" [Gustave Flaubert letter]
"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat" [Robert Frost]
"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines" [Lord Macaulay Essays]
"Poetry (is) a speaking picture, with this end; to teach and delight" [Sir Philip Sidney The Defence of Poetry]
"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes" [Joseph Roux Meditations of a Parish Priest]
"Prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order" [Samuel Taylor Coleridge Table Talk]
"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" [Marianne Moore Poetry]
"Poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history" [Aristotle Poetics]
"Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it" [Jeremy Bentham]
"I am two fools, I know,"
"For loving, and for saying so"
"In whining poetry" [John Donne The Triple Fool]
"Poetry's a mere drug, Sir" [George Farquhar Love and a Battle]
"If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all" [John Keats letter]
"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo" [Don Marquis]
"Most people ignore most poetry"
"because"
"most poetry ignores most people" [Adrian Mitchell Poems]
"All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose" [Molière Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme]
"it is not poetry, but prose run mad" [Alexander Pope An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot]

Poetry

Poetry and prosody terms accentual metre, accentual-syllabic metre or stress-syllabic metre, Adonic, Alcaic, Alexandrine, alliteration, amoebaean or amoebean, amphibrach, amphimacer, anacrusis, arsis, anapaest or anapest, anapaestic or anapestic, antistrophe, assonance, bacchius, ballad stanza, blank verse, bob, cadence or cadency, caesura or cesura, canto, catalectic, choriamb or choriambus, closed couplet, common measure, common metre, consonance or consonancy, couplet, cretic or amphimacer, dactyl, dactylic, diaeresis or dieresis, dipody, distich, elision, end-stopped, enjambement, envoy or envoi, epode, eye rhyme, feminine ending, feminine rhyme, foot, free verse or vers libre, half-rhyme, hemistich, heptameter, heptastich, heroic couplet, hexameter, hypermeter, iamb or iambus, iambic, ictus, internal rhyme, ionic, jabberwocky, leonine rhyme, long metre, macaronic, masculine ending, masculine rhyme, metre, octameter, octave or octet, onomatopoeia, ottava rima, paeon, paeonic, pararhyme, pentameter, pentastich, perfect rhyme or full rhyme, Pindaric, pyhrric, quantitative metre, quatrain, quintain or quintet, refrain, rhyme, rhyme royal, rhyme scheme, rhythm, rime riche, Sapphic, scansion, septet, sestet, sestina or sextain, short metre, Spenserian stanza, spondee, spondaic, sprung rhythm, stanza, stichic, strophe, syllabic metre, tercet, terza rima, tetrabrach, tetrameter, tetrapody, tetrastich, triplet, trochaic, trochee, unstopped, verse paragraph, wheel

Poetry movements and groupings Alexandrians, Decadents, Georgian Poets, imagists, Lake Poets, Liverpool Poets, Metaphysical Poets, the Movement, Petrarchans, Romantics, Scottish Chaucerians, symbolists

Poets Dannie Abse (Welsh), (Karen) Fleur Adcock (New Zealander), Conrad (Potter) Aiken (U.S.), Anna Akhamatova (Russian), Maya Angelou (U.S.), Guillaume Apollinaire (French), Ludovico Ariosto (Italian), Matthew Arnold (English), W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (English-U.S.), Charles Pierre Baudelaire (French), Patricia Beer (English), Hilaire Belloc (British), John Berryman (U.S.), John Betjeman (English), Elizabeth Bishop (U.S.), William Blake (English), Edmund Blunden (English), Joseph Brodsky (Russian-American), Rupert (Chawner) Brooke (English), Gwendolyn Brooks (U.S.), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English), Robert Browning (English), Robert Burns (Scottish), (George Gordon) Byron (British), Callimachus (Greek), Luis Vaz de Camoëns (Portuguese), Thomas Campion (English), Raymond Carver (U.S.), Gaius Valerius Catullus (Roman), Charles Causley (English), Geoffrey Chaucer (English), Amy Clampitt (U.S.), John Clare (English), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English), William Cowper (English), George Crabbe (English), e(dward) e(stlin) cummings (U.S.), Dante (Alighieri) (Italian), Cecil Day Lewis (Irish), Walter de la Mare (English), Emily Dickinson (U.S.), John Donne (English), H D (Hilda Doolittle) (U.S.), John Dryden (English), Carol Ann Duffy (Scottish), William Dunbar (Scottish), Douglas Dunn (Scottish), Geoffrey Dutton (Australian), T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (U.S.-British), Ebenezer Elliot (the Corn Law Rhymer) (English), Paul Éluard (French), Ralph Waldo Emerson (U.S.), William Empson (English), Edward Fitzgerald (English), Robert Fitzgerald (Australian), Robert (Lee) Frost (U.S.), Allen Ginsberg (U.S.), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German), Robert Graves (English), Thomas Gray (English), Thom Gunn (English), Seamus Heaney (Irish), Adrian Henri (English), Robert Henryson (Scottish), George Herbert (English), Robert Herrick (English), Hesiod (Greek), Geoffrey Hill (English), Ralph Hodgson (English), Homer (Greek), Thomas Hood (English), Gerard Manley Hopkins (English), Horace (Roman), A(lfred) E(dward) Housman (English), Ted Hughes (English), Elizabeth Jennings (English), Samuel Johnson (English), Ben Jonson (English), Juvenal (Roman), Patrick Kavanagh (Irish), John Keats (English), Sidney Keyes (English), (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling (English), Jean de La Fontaine (French), Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (French), Walter Savage Landor (English), William Langland (English), Philip Larkin (English), Tom Leonard (Scottish), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (U.S.), Amy Lowell (U.S.), Robert Lowell (U.S.), Richard Lovelace (English), Lucretius (Roman), Thomas Macauley (English), Norman MacCaig (Scottish), Hugh MacDiarmid (Scottish), Roger McGough (English), Sorley MacLean (Scottish), Louis MacNeice (Irish), Stéphane Mallarmé (French), Martial (Roman), Andrew Marvell (English), John Masefield (English), Edna St Vincent Millay (U.S.), John Milton (English), Marianne Moore (U.S.), Edwin Morgan (Scottish), Andrew Motion (English), Edwin Muir (Scottish), Ogden Nash (U.S.), Pablo Neruda (Chilean), Frank O'Hara (U.S.), Omar Khayyam (Persian), Ovid (Roman), Wilfred Owen (British), Brian Patten (English), Octavio Paz (Mexican), Petrarch (Italian), Pindar (Greek), Sylvia Plath (U.S.), Alexander Pope (English), Peter Porter (Australian), Ezra (Loomis) Pound (U.S.), Sextus Propertius (Roman), Aleksander Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian), Kathleen Raine (English), Adrienne Rich (U.S.), Laura Riding (U.S.), Rainer Maria Rilke (Austro-German), Arthur Rimbaud (French), (John Wilmot) Rochester (English), Theodore Huebner Roethke (U.S.), Isaac Rosenberg (English), Christina Georgina Rossetti (English), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English), Saint-John Perse (French), Sappho (Greek), Siegfried Sassoon (English), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (German), Delmore Schwarz (U.S.), Sir Walter Scott (Scottish), Jaroslav Seifert (Czech), William Shakespeare (English), Percy Bysshe Shelley (English), Sir Philip Sidney (English), Edith Sitwell (English), John Skelton (English), Christopher Smart (English), Stevie Smith (English), Robert Southey (English), Stephen Spender (English), Edmund Spenser (English), Wallace Stevens (U.S.), Algernon Charles Swinburne (English), Wislawa Szymborska (Polish), Torquato Tasso (Italian), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (English), Dylan (Marlais) Thomas (Welsh), Edward Thomas (English), R(onald) S(tuart) Thomas (Welsh), James Thomson (Scottish), Paul Verlaine (French), Alfred Victor de Vigny (French), François Villon (French), Virgil (Roman), Derek Walcott (West Indian), Francis Charles Webb (Australian), Walt Whitman (U.S.), William Wordsworth (English), Judith Wright (Australian), Thomas Wyatt (English), W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats (Irish)

Collins Thesaurus of the English Language – Complete and Unabridged 2nd Edition. 2002 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2002

poetry

noun

1. A poetic work or poetic works:

poem, poesy, rhyme, verse.

2. Something likened to poetry, as in form or style:

lyricism, poem.

Translations

الشِّعْرشِعْرشِعْر، قَصائِد

poezie

poesidigtekunstdigtninglyrik

Lyrik Poesie Dichtkunst Gedicht

ποίηση

poesía

luule

runous

poésie

poezijapjesništvo

költészetversekköltemény

kveîskapur, ljóîagerîskáldskapur

poesia

詩歌韻文詩

시

poëzie

poesi diktekunst diktning

poezja

poesia

поэзия

pesništvopoezija

poesi

บทกวี

şiirşiir yazma

thơ ca

作诗诗诗篇

poetry

[ˈpəʊɪtrɪ]

A. N → poesía f
poetry in motion → poesía f en movimiento

B. CPD poetry magazine N → revista f de poesía
poetry reading N → recital m or lectura f de poesías

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

poetry

[ˈpəʊɪtri]

n → poésie f

modif [prize, competition, magazine, book] → de poésiepoetry reading n → lecture f de poèmes

Collins English/French Electronic Resource. © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

poetry

→ Dichtung f; (not epic also) → Lyrik f; to write poetry → Gedichte schreiben, dichten; the rules of poetry → die Regeln der Versdichtung; poetry reading → Dichterlesung f

(fig) → Poesie f; the dancing was poetry in motion → der Tanz war in Bewegung umgesetzte Poesie; the sunset was sheer poetry → der Sonnenuntergang war reinste Poesie

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

poetry

[ˈpəʊɪtrɪ] n → poesia
to write poetry → scrivere (delle) poesie

poet

(ˈpouit) – feminine ˈpoet ~ˈpoetess – noun

a person who writes poems.

poetic (pouˈetik) adjective

of, like, or suitable for, a poem. a poetic expression.

poˈetically adverb

ˈpoetry noun

1. poems in general. He writes poetry.

2. the art of composing poems. Poetry comes naturally to some people.

poetry

→ شِعْر poezie poesi Lyrik ποίηση poesía runous poésie poezija poesia 詩歌 시 poëzie poesi poezja poesia поэзия poesi บทกวี şiir thơ ca 诗篇

References in classic literature ?

But as Ossian, if he ever lived, lived in the third century, as it is not probable that his poems were written down at the time, and as the oldest books that we have containing any of his poetry were written in the twelfth century, it is very difficult to be sure that he really made the poems called by his name.

Little James never forgot these things, and long afterwards, when he grew to be a man and wrote poetry, it was full of the sounds of battle, full, too, of love for mountain and glen and their rolling mists.

View in context

This, according to your idea and mine of poetry, I feel to be false-the less poetical the critic, the less just the critique, and the converse.

I remarked before that in proportion to the poetical talent would be the justice of a critique upon poetry. Therefore a bad poet would, I grant, make a false critique, and his self-love would infallibly bias his little judgment in his favor; but a poet, who is indeed a poet, could not, I think, fail of making-a just critique; whatever should be deducted on the score of self-love might be replaced on account of his intimate acquaintance with the subject; in short, we have more instances of false criticism than of just where one's own writings are the test, simply because we have more bad poets than good.

View in context

Exposition (as in most essays) cannot as a rule be permeated with so much emotion as narration or, certainly, as lyric poetry. In a great book the relation of the two faculties will of course properly correspond to form and spirit.

It is, of course, one of the main things to be desired in most narrative; though sometimes the effect sought may be something different, as, for instance, in romance and poetry, an atmosphere of dreamy beauty.

View in context

I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry.

View in context

The early Greek epic -- that is, poetry as a natural and popular, and not (as it became later) an artificial and academic literary form -- passed through the usual three phases, of development, of maturity, and of decline.

View in context

Not your idea of poetry, perhaps, but, after a new and growing fashion in poetry, truly poetic.

View in context

It will readily occur to the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds the minstrels of the old Scandinavians the race, as the Laureate so happily terms them,

View in context

At last the golden age of Chinese poetry is at hand.

View in context

The essential difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr.