Introduction

Poetry, our oldest language art and perhaps the most recognisable, should be easy to define. And yet seemingly it isn't. Poetry cannot be defined, or so Borges says, without oversimplifying it: ‘it would be like attempting to define the colour yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn’. In this albeit idealised view, poetry is more than a set of formal features. It is something to be experienced. Part of the problem, then, in defining poetry is that it seems to refer to two distinct things: a verbal artefact and something that is more difficult to define because it is less determinate. Poetry, as Paul Valéry points out, also ‘expresses a certain state of mind’. Perhaps this is what Emily Dickinson meant when she famously remarked: ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?’

Of course not all poems aspire to nor achieve the spectacular effects, however metaphorical, that Dickinson describes. Light verse, for instance, is happy enough with a laugh. But Dickinson's observation has endured because those who love poetry know something of what she is gesturing at. The poem, with its roots in ritual, brings speech and vision together in such a way that the person experiencing it might be transported into an alternative awareness. For Les Murray this is the raison d’être: ‘the poem exists’, he says, ‘to contain the poetic experience’.