The argument in favor of poetry is probably hindered by the fact that it is led by poets. What I mean by this is two-fold. First, there’s the element of imagined insincerity. If a poet puts out an ...

And there are poems that have almost no persona, as in the microgenre whose speaker is a poetry instructor (see “Introduction to Poetry,” by Billy Collins).

What we have therefore in the Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin) is a body of poetry divided between two opposite theories of poetic responsibility. Should the poem “mean” or “be”?