Some Impulses to Poetry

Abstract

People have always found ways to involve poetry in their lives, in their ordinary as well as their more exalted affairs. In this first chapter, as we briefly consider a few of these occasions, we may begin to have a sense of how wide-ranging and how various the impulse to poetic expression is. At the same time, we begin to see, in very different poems, certain features that poems seem to have in common: freshness of perception, economy of language, striking images, pleasing rhythms, and more.