What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I’m not sure it can accomplish anything that other forms can’t, but it certainly accomplishes some things more readily. One is density of meaning. Other forms can achieve it, but it’s hard to compete with poetry in terms of the ratio between the meaning conveyed and the number of words employed. Of course, that’s partly why poetry tends to be “hard”—it’s “hard” because it’s dense; it’s overloaded with meaning, relatively speaking. And insofar as this level of density can be achieved in other forms, it tends not to be sustained (since it’s hard to write, and takes effort to read). And we tend to describe the result, appropriately enough, as “poetic.”
The other thing that I look to poetry for, which may or may not be related to what I’ve written above about density, is its relative freedom from the injunction that writing should “make sense.” Wittgenstein once wrote that “a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” This of course applies to all genres of literature, to varying degrees. But poetry seems to me the most liberated from the information-provision game (which isn’t to say that a poem can’t convey information, if that’s what the poet wants it to do). There are many ways to mean without at the same time making much in the way of denotative sense, and in fact, jettisoning some amount of denotative sense might be a prerequisite to our being able to clearly perceive these other kinds of meaning. I think these kinds of investigations are important, and I think poetry is the genre in which one can explore these outer dimensions of meaning most freely.
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