March 21 was celebrated as World Poetry Day throughout the world. The Day was basically declared by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1999. The purpose of the day is to promote the reading, writing, publishing and teaching of poetry throughout the world and, as the UNESCO session declaring the day says, to "give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements".

Poetry is considered an integral part of art, literature and in a wider context a part of culture. It is considered as a medium through which the poets express their emotions, feelings, understandings, teachings and even philosophies. However, poetry is not just expression; it is expression in a beautiful manner. The poets do not just express themselves in poetry but paint their poems with the colors of appropriate words, phrases and rhythms. This article is a collection of discussions on poetry by some of the well-known personalities in English literature, which would help understanding poetry in a better way.

Poetry, for Aristotle – the great Greek philosopher, is a genius which is sharply divided into species, the noblest of which is tragedy. Taken together, these species – tragedy, comedy, the epic and the others – would constitute the genius, without any surplus or residuum. He could not think of any poetry independent of some distinct kind of poem. To Aristotle every kind of art is a mode of imitation. Yet there are differences between the various modes of imitation. One such difference is in their medium of imitation. Poetry like other forms of art is also a mode of imitation. The medium of the poet and the painter are different. The painter’s medium of imitation is color and form, the poet’s is rhythm and harmony. Aristotle finds an affinity between poetry and music; rhythm and harmony. Poetry is nearer to music than to painting, as it, too, imitates through harmony and rhythm. To this it adds language as well. The linking of poetry and music is significant, as it suggests that poetry is something above mere mimicry.

According to Sidney – the name very much familiar in English literature – poetry is superior to all sciences. Different sciences have different ends, but the chief end of all sciences alike is to promote knowledge. Poetry may be identified with the mistress knowledge; “the knowledge of man’s self – the supreme knowledge to which all others are subservient.” Sidney believes that the poet is a greater teacher than the philosopher, because of his capacity for moving the reader, which is well nigh, the cause and the effects of teaching.

The theory of the ‘Poet of Nature’ – William Wordsworth – regarding poetry is very helpful to understand poetry. In his theory he has sent down the origin, nature and purpose of poetry and the function of the poet in a civil society. Wordsworth defines poetry that it is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till the tranquility disappears and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does prove itself that it actually exists in mind. The clear springs of poetry must flow freely and spontaneously; it cannot be made to flow through artificially laid pipes. Poetry is born, not in the mind but in the heart overflowing with feelings. Poetry is produced by a man, who being possessed of more than organic sensibility, had also thought long and deep.

Wordsworth talks of ‘expressing powerful feelings’ felt in the heart and not generated in the mind. Poetry takes its birth in the springs of the heart and not in the cold store of the intellect. All of us feel, so does the poet, but he feels intensely and deeply. The poet’s heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow. The heightened emotional state of the poet finds expression through his verses. Thus according to Wordsworth, deep emotion is the fundamental condition of poetry. It is the feeling that matters. He discards Aristotelian doctrine. For him, the plot, of situation, is not the first thing. Wordsworth himself says that “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation”.

Wordsworth lays emphasis that good poetry is never an immediate reaction to the provoking cause; that our sensations must be allowed time to sink back into the common fund of our experience, there to find their level and due proportion. That live is found for them by the mind in the act of contemplation and then in the process of contemplation, the sensations revive, and out of the union of the contemplating mind and the receiving sensibility, rises that unique mood of expression which we call poetry.

Poetry for Coleridge, a philosophical critic, is a wider category than that of poem, that is, poetry is a kind of activity, which can be engaged in by painters or philosophers or scientists and is not confined to those who employ metrical language, or even to those who employ language of any kind. Poetry in this larger sense brings the whole soul of men into activity, with each faculty playing its proper part according to its relative worth and dignity. It is the excitement of emotion for the purpose of immediate pleasure through the medium of beauty.

Coleridge also says that poetry does not get itself written without the aid of the conscious will and understanding. So too, the pleasure attached to the poetic emotion or excitement is not merely a sympathy with the objects, emotions or incidents contemplated by the poet, but is also a pleasure of the mind in the exhibition of its powers for their own sake, as is hinted in the phrase ‘full play’. It is a pleasure peculiar to poetry as poetic emotion is peculiar.

Poetry, no doubt, has worth of its own. It is not just the language that makes poetry, neither it is the emotions or intellect alone; rather it is the amalgam of all of them that makes a good poetry and a good poetry always has it imprints on the minds of the individuals, in the literary books and ultimately in the annals of history.