Expert Insight
The celebrated American poet Edgar Allan Poe said, "Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words." He believed that a poem was there to be an aesthetic thing unto itself, not just a vehicle for some other agenda. On the mysterious and ineffable nature of what constitutes a poem, the poet-naturalist Henry David Thoreau said, "My life has been the poem I would have writ / But I could not both live and utter it." In other words, poetry has a life of its own.