Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.
And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.
As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.