Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
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.
You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind on, but what you can’t keep your mind off.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
If we ask a vague question, such as, ‘What is poetry?’ we expect a vague answer, such as, ‘Poetry is the music of words,’ or ‘Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time – as with a sonnet – the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet’s health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
