Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.