Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.
I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.