Poetry
People seldom feel neutral about poetry. Those who love it sometimes give the impression that it is an adequate substitute for food, shelter, and love. But it isn't. Those who dislike poetry on principle sometimes claim, on the other hand, that poetry is only words and good for nothing. That's not true either. When words represent and recreate genuine human feelings, as they often do in poetry, they can be very important. Poems provide, in fact, a language for feeling, and one of poetry's most insistent merits involves its attempt to express the inexpressible. One of the joys of experiencing poetry occurs when we read a poem and want to say, "yes, that is just what it is like; I know exactly what that line means but I have never been able to express it so well." Poetry can be the voice of our feelings even when our minds are speechless with grief or joy.