Here then are my two dozen standing stones.[writes Christopher Rush http://www.felixdennis.com/subject/poetry-subject/poets-playlist/]

(1)                     Poetry is more philosophical and serious than history. (Aristotle)

(2)                     The truest poetry is the most feigning. (Shakespeare)

(3)                    Poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate. (Milton)

(4)                     Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. (Wordsworth)

(5)                     Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity. (Wordsworth)

(6)                     Poetry is the best words in the best order. (Coleridge)

(7)                     Poetry should surprise by a fine excess. (Keats)

(8)                     If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. (Keats)

(9)                     Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. (Flaubert)

(10)                   Poetry is a means of overcoming chaos. (I.A. Richards, literary critic)

(11)                    Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Frost)

(12)                    Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. (Frost)

(13)                    Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood. (Eliot)

(14)                    Poetry is what heals by cauterising painful emotion.  (Felix Dennis – with apologies to Felix for my verbal         shorthand)

(15)                    Poetry is what makes you more human than you were before.  (Rush)

(16)                    Poetry is what makes you fall back in love with life when you have fallen out of it.  (Rush again!)

In addition to these landmarks, there were some general pronouncements on poets, all of which seemed to cast their various lights on my top-ten cull.

(17)                   The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.  (Shakespeare)

(18)                   The poet’s task is to take this bronze world and make it gold.  (Sidney)

(19)                    To the poet nothing can be useless.  (Johnson)

(20)                   The poet must preside over the thoughts and manners of future generations as a being superior to time and place.

(21)                   The language of the age is never the language of poetry.  (Gray)

(22)                   The language of the age is always the language of poetry!  (Wordsworth)

(23)                   A poet is a man speaking to men.  (Wordsworth)

(24)                   Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  (Shelley)

There were others that sprang to mind.  But life is short – and weekends shorter.  There were, however, two passages about poetry which I’ve always kept on a bedside cabinet composed of little grey cells on the left-hand side of my brain.  One is from The Cave of Making by another old bugger,

W.H. Auden:

After all it’s rather a privilege
Amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly insists upon
being read or ignored.

The second passage is from a lecture given by A.E. Housman at Cambridge in or around – I think – 1932.  Housman said there was such a thing as sham poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a substitute, the best example of it being the kind of verse written between Samson Agonistes in 1671 and the Lyrical Ballads in 1798: the kind dominated by intelligence, which involved, as Matthew Arnold also wrote, ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry … some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul’.  The eighteenth century poets wrote not out of the depths but out of their heads, and poetry does not come out of the skull but out of the gut or soul.  If poetry came out of the head the Augustans would have written it rather better.  And when you look at the four eighteenth century poets who did write it better – Collins, Smart, Cowper and Blake – you see at once why they did so, why they were able to.  You see the only thing they all had in common – they were all mad!

Aha!  Remember Plato?  ‘He who without the Muses’ madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poetry, and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that poetry he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.’

It’s dangerous to offer examples, but perhaps the last obvious madmen to write true poetry were Dylan Thomas and R S Thomas – both Welsh!  Larkin put himself into a most effective poetic straight-jacket, successfully creating the impression that he was almost sane.   But he wasn’t.  He wasn’t simply the intelligent Hull Grump.  He had the madness in his soul that Plato talked about.  I read many contemporary poets on the other hand, and find them dismayingly sane.  They have something to say but can’t say them in the way that will move as Milton once moved.

What is it about those six simple words of his – Housman asks – that almost draws tears?

Nymphs and shepherd dance no more

Is it that they evoke a sense of that older England which Felix writes about in one of my chosen poems?
Housman gives the only answer he can:
‘I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to something in men which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organisation of his nature.’