"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth".
Samuel Johnson

"prose - words in their best order; poetry - the best words in their best order."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
Edgar Allan Poe

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say,"May new sufferings torment your soul."
Soren Kierkegaard

Good poetry exquisitely will interpret the world
But great poetry occasionally can change it.
Me (After Marx)