“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.”– W. S. Merwin Related Quotes “I am grateful for – though I can’t keep up with – the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.”– A. R. Ammons “Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”– Aristotle “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”– Plutarch