Disclaimer: thinking is a disturbing use of time. We start to notice that our everyday lives are built around words we can’t define. We can only vaguely describe what we mean when we use them. The more subjective the effects we’re describing, the worse it gets. Colors, for example, can be talked about objectively in terms of the visible spectrum of light, but that has very little to do with our perception and response to what we see. We can say something similar for music. And, we are at an utter loss when it comes to using language to understand a creature of language such as poetry. The common definitions of “poem” are not helpful, to put it kindly. Most talk about beautiful language or language that emphasizes features traditionally associated with poetry, such as meter, rhyme, metaphor, etc. It is easy to think of great poems that avoid most of these features and even easier to think of dull or grotesque linguistic constructions that use meter, metaphor, and rhymes and make us want to crawl under the table. In other words, they may be verse but are certainly not poetry. Thank you for tolerating my disclaimer. Now that we’ve acknowledged how entangled and hopeless the whole business is, we can get on to trying to say something useful about what poems are or at least what poems do. Perhaps the most interesting thing about human beings as a species is that we excel at communication. We’re not terribly strong, fast, or furry, but we’ve done alright for the last three hundred thousand years. (I’m well aware that doesn’t mean we’ll get through the next hundred years, which is itself a good reason to keep these reflections brief.) Basic informational communication is straightforward: “The waterhole is by the big tree with the twisted trunk.” Humans, though, had to do more than that to survive. They had to convince others to help them, to bond with them, and to respond to their desires. It is no accident that one of the largest categories in poetry is love poems of one sort or another. Poetry is a language-tool that human beings developed to communicate complex perceptional and emotional states. When we encounter a poem, one of the first things we realize is that it presents itself as a poem. It can be recited, read in a book or magazine, even seen on a billboard, but we notice that someone intends us to receive it for something more than informational purposes. It is true that we have didactic poems that range from Hesiod’s Works and Days to “Thirty days hath September,” and these achieve their goal of becoming retained information by use of poetic forms. For the most part though, this is not our sense of what poetry is. Let’s imagine opening a random book at a bookstore or library. On the page is a group of words divided into lines. Perhaps the first word of every line is capitalized, or perhaps not. Perhaps there are no capital letters at all. Perhaps the lines are divided into stanzas or strophes. Just from this, it would be reasonable to assume that the language in front of our eyes is a poem. It is intended as a special kind of communication to us. If it is a lyric poem, the writer wants to give the readers access to a state of mind or emotion. If it’s a narrative poem, we anticipate a story meant to engage our emotions and intellect. Or, perhaps we are speaking with a friend and that person turns to us and with a change of vocal tone begins to speak in words that have an observable rhythm or even noticeable rhymes. We know that our friend is trying to communicate something important to us by reciting a poem. Similarly, the poem may be presented as a part of ritual. All religions use ritualistic language to bring together the practitioners. This ritualistic language announces itself as a communication to a god or to the worshipers, or to some part of the self. Like the lyric or the narrative, we recognize it immediately as poetry. By announcing themselves as a poem, words, whether written or spoken, explain to us how to receive them. They are words with a purpose, and we are to consider them in light of that purpose. Their significance is not simply informational, even if they contain information. Their goal is not simply to inform us of someone else’s state of mind, but to make a state of mind real to us, to make it a part of our own mental and emotional world. These considerations tell us how we might recognize a poem, but they only begin to tell us what poems are and what they do. If something ordinarily unknowable is presented to me, in this case someone else’s state of mind, my immediate question will be “How do I know this is real?” I have no way to verify what Shakespeare was feeling when he wrote a particular sonnet or even to verify what a poet feels who might be sitting in the same room where I’m sitting and reading the poem directly to me. The poem can only convince us of its reality by making connections. If I share none of the experiences that gave rise to the poem and recognize none of the physical details found in the poem, then it is not going to become part of my reality. But, if the poet situates the poem in a way that I recognize, gives me that little bit of backstory that makes me feel at home, I can begin to accept the poem’s emotional or intellectual assertions. Further, if the poet uses concrete nouns, brings into the poem the things of the world: the cat, the chair, the pineapple, the wooden table from Peru, then I begin to experience what the poet is experiencing. The poem starts to be real to me, which means a connection has been made, or many connections. Poems connect us to an experience. Interestingly, we do not have the same experience as the poet. If that were the case, we would lose our own identities in reading the poem, and that’s not what happens. We retain our separateness. We may be changed in some way by reading the poem; we may approach our own lives differently, be more aware. But, it’s naïve to think that reading poems—and experiencing the connections in that process—will make us better citizens or change for the better political perspectives. If our moral or political views are changed by a poem, chances are that other factors are involved as well. To the extent that poems may change us, they do it subtly. They may make us better able to imagine what it might be like to be someone else or to feel what someone else feels, and they may make us better able to appreciate nuance. Poems often come about because the poet has felt conflicting emotions; the poem allows us to feel that conflict. Yeats, for example, in “Easter 1916” celebrates but doesn’t entirely support the Easter rebellion. He tells us how “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart,” and questions, “Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said.” The conflict is not resolved. It is embodied in Yeats’s verse, in the reciting of the names of the dead and acknowledging the “terrible beauty” of their sacrifice. When we read the poem, we take this unresolved conflict into ourselves, half a world away from Ireland and more than a century away from the writing of the poem. In short, we are connected. Poetry, then, is a special kind of communication that allows us to connect through the poem to the mind that wrote the poem. It makes use of our perceptions to create a reality that we, as readers, can access. Poems almost inevitably seek to become this reality for the reader. Sometimes, the words of the poem even go so far as to become mimetic, to suggest in their sound the situation that brings them into being or that is being described. In Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” the poet gives us the amazing lines: “Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck / Like a rush-imbedded swan.” The sound of the first line, its length of its vowels, its meter, stretch just as Laura stretches to hear the Goblins’ voices describing their fruit, while the second line pulls us back into its consonants to create an image in sound of the place where the movement originates. This is consummate poetic skill, but poetry can also seek the real by eschewing such poetic devices in favor of voice and tone. Cavafy in the original Greek certainly uses elegant meters and mixes types of language that are not available in other languages. However, translations of his work into those other languages are usually successful. There is a restrained tone created by diction, subject matter, and point of view that identify Cavafy’s poems in whatever language they find themselves and make real the fictional thoughts, actions, and loves of persons dead for two thousand years or alive in twentieth-century Alexandria. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote to Rilke that in her practice as a psychoanalyst she would read Rilke’s poems to her patients because she believed they were helped by his tone. She doesn’t say they were helped by his thoughts, observations, or images, but by his tone. No definition of poetry can be limited to a set of linguistic devices or practices. The poet is always adding, combining, restricting, recombining, even omitting all these. The definition of poetry that we’re looking for is not to be found in its features but in its goal: to become as real as possible.