Stephanie Burt

So: don’t read poetry. Don’t assume poetry ever means only one thing, other than maybe a set of tools for making things with words, as music means a set of tools (beats, rhythms, harmonies, textures, instruments) for making things with sounds. Instead, find ways to encounter kinds of poems and learn different reasons to read poems, realized in various ways by various poems.

Auden also called poetry, in general, as he read it, “the clear expression of mixed feelings,”

Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core.