What is poetry?

Ah, now there is a question that has tied up better minds than mine in knots for quite a while.

I recently found this rather nice piece - on the nature of poetry, and on the difficulties of teaching it - by the American, Billy Collins. He was the US Poet Laureate a few years ago, and seems to be widely disparaged as too 'popular', too 'accessible'. I haven't found much of his stuff yet, but what I've seen, I like. 'Popular' and 'accessible' are not bad things!

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say, drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

Is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it;

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins