Poetry is a verbal art utilizing as a vehicle the forms of verse and closely related rhythms and intonations. Poetry is frequently characterized by a heavy and sustained use of metaphor. In intellectual poetry symbolism may be introduced along with cultural history. In anti-intellectual poetry meaning may be subordinated to 'melody'. Poem-making, like tool-making, is a basic human trait. Its varieties, in the twentieth century, have become endless.
In Hinduism, the kavi is both poet and seer, one who reveals knowledge from his own insight; and the rishis added to this a knowledge of the divine, producing hymns revealing eternal truths which they grasped intuitively.
In Persia poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung – for one reason alone – because it works. A right combination of image and tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood and trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping and fits of dancing – measurable physical responses to art.
To the poet, surrendering to enthusiasm opens the experience of that magical and apparently spontaneous generation of poetic form which comes about when the inspiring spirit descends upon the poet. Such spontaneity is at once the expression of the energizing of imaginative thought, and the evidence of it.
Poetry is a form of language which is proper to imaginative and creative discourse; it allows man to reach beyond the confines of a merely quantitative order of things. By means of analogical and symbolic thinking, by mediating images and the play of correspondences and unusual associations, and by virtue of a language through which is transmitted the very rhythm of being, the poet clothes himself in a surreality to which the scientific mode of thought cannot aspire.
In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison – a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all. If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism and that re-connect poetry to the body. Such crimes are not crimes against bodies, but against ideas which are deadly and suffocating. Not stupid crimes of reaction but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love.