A poet is a person who writes poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be a writer of poetry, or may perform their art to an audience.
Postmortal fictional portrait of Slovak poet Janko Kráľ (1822-1876) - an idealized romanticized picture of "how a real poet should look like" in Western culture.
The Italian Giacomo Leopardi was mentioned by the University of Birmingham as "one of the most radical and challenging of nineteenth-century thinkers".[1]
The work of a poet is essentially one of communication, either expressing ideas in a literal sense, such as writing about a specific event or place, or metaphorically. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary greatly in different cultures and time periods.[2] Throughout each civilization and language, poets have used various styles that have changed through the course of literary history, resulting in a history of poets as diverse as the literature they have produced.