I once knew a girl named Poetry. Everyone called her Poe. Everyone except me. I called her Poetry.

I asked Poetry one day if she knew the meaning of her name, and she said yes: “To make,” Poetry said, and Poetry was right.

The word “poetry,” from the Greek poiein, means exactly that: “to create, to craft, to make.”

Poems like all other artistic works are created things, and poets are for this reason creators, pure and complicated. (Prose literally defined means “straightforward” — from the Latin prosa, proversus: “turned to face forward.”)

To create means to make. To make means to bring something new into the world. It means to bring something into the world which didn’t exist before you made it.

“The poets are the makers,” poet Richard Wilbur in 1950 said. “And they appear to be dying, or are already dead.”

The act of making is the act of reimagining and rearranging. Matter cannot be destroyed. It’s imperishable, perdurable, eternal. It changes forms but cannot cease to exist. This is why the words “creating” and “making” mean reimagining and rearranging.

Literature is the art-form of language — written language and spoken language both — and poetry is a subdivision of literature. This is a fact well-known and universally accepted.

Less universally accepted is the fact that poetry belongs to another art-form as well: the art-form of music.

Poetry is rhythm and rhyme. It’s cadence and count, metric and tempo. It’s accent and phrasing, syllable and scansion. It’s consonance and dynamic inflection. These are some of the elements of poetry which make it a subdivision of music.

In the words of the ancient Roman orator Marcus Fabius Quintilian:

Who is ignorant of the fact that music was in ancient times the object not merely of intense study but of veneration? In fact Orpheus and Linus, to mention no others, were regarded as uniting the roles of musician, poet, and philosopher. So too Timagenes asserts that music is the oldest of the arts related to literature, a statement which is confirmed by the testimony of the greatest of poets in whose songs we read that the praise of heroes and of gods were sung to the music of the lyre at the feasts of kings…. Aristoxenus divides music, in so far as it concerns the voice, into rhythm and melody, the one consisting in measure, the latter in sound and song. Now I ask you whether it is not absolutely necessary for the orator to be acquainted with all these methods of expression which are concerned firstly with gesture, secondly with the arrangement of words and thirdly with the inflexions of the voice.… Eloquence does vary both tone and rhythm, expressing sublime thoughts with elevation, pleasing thoughts with sweetness, and ordinary with gentle utterance, and in every expression of its art is in sympathy with the emotions of which it is the musical mouthpiece.

Still, as musical as much poetry is, it belongs most fundamentally of all to the art-form of literature.

The primary elements of the poetic art are style and theme.

It’s important to emphasize also that the words “poetry” and “poetic” are not synonymous with the word “poem.” The difference between them is that “poetry” and “poetic” are general terms, whereas the term “poem” is specific: all poems are in theory poetic, but not all poetry is a poem.

Novels, plays, essays, memoirs, chronicles, short stories, and every other form of literature can be poetic. In fact one can even argue that some of the most poetic literature ever written is found in novels and plays:

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine,” for example, from Macbeth, or from Moby Dick, “The circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring.”

These are both undeniably poetic passages — they’re without question poetry — but not in and of themselves poems.

This distinction is in many ways self-evident and even on some level, perhaps, obvious. I devote an entire section to it here only because this distinction is as often as not (and with a curious consistency) passed-over or entirely missed — and by an astonishing number of excellent poets, intelligent commentators, and otherwise insightful critics.

The poet-critic John Longenbach, for instance, in his famous and frequently quoted book The Art of the Poetic Line,which in recent years has become a touchstone for virtually every term related to poems and the poetic art, defines poetry — not, please note, the written poem — in this way:

“Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines.”

Clearly in his book, all throughout the book, Mr. Longenbach conflates the word poetry with the words written poem and at the same time ignores in his definition of poetry the unignorable issue of meaning and comprehensibility. Mr. Longenbach isn’t the first to do so, nor I predict will he be the last.

I repeat: these words aren’t synonymous. The poetic isn’t the equivalent of the poem.

A poem, by definition, is a self-standing piece, of varying length, with a certain meter, rhythm, and style, all of which when done with philosophic-poetic integration combine to convey a theme. A poem is a self-contained unit.

When done with something less than philosophic-poetic integration, theme is often absent — in which case the piece in question most definitely does by definition still fully qualify as a poem: specifically, a poem of pure observation and descriptive depiction, still sometimes known as a “vignette” or a “lyric,” whose merit rests entirely upon the strength of the poet’s language, phrasing, meter, metric, euphony, density of description, and perhaps most of all its intelligibility.

Well-written yet themeless poems are in this reader’s opinion among the most artistically satisfying poems the world has ever known — particularly when such poems contain close and careful observations, eloquent or striking depictions, clarity foremost of all, and a richness of description — all of which is to say: when they exhibit an excellence of style.

Here’s an example of one such:

THE HERON

The heron stands in water where the swamp
Has deepened to the blackness of a pool,
Or balances with one leg on a hump
Of marsh grass heaped above a muskrat hole.

He walks the shallow with an antic grace.
The great feet break the ridges of the sand.
The long eye notes the minnow’s hiding place.
His beak is quicker than a human hand.

He jerks a frog across his bony lip,
Then points his heavy bill above the wood.
The wide wings flap but once to lift him up.
A single ripple starts from where he stood.

— Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke’s masterful poem “The Heron” has no theme to speak of — theme here meaning a wider abstraction or premise or a philosophic principle fused with the subject-matter of the heron — yet Roethke’s poem is nearly perfect. Strike that: it is perfect.

When the poet W.H. Auden was asked what he most looks for in an aspiring poet, Auden answered:

“If a student comes to me and says he wants to be a poet because he has something to say, I suggest he take a few science classes first and then come back to me. But if a student comes to me and says that she wants to be a poet because she likes to look at things closely, I suggest she enroll in my poetry class immediately.”

Lineation is an integral and even definitional part of the written poem — written, I repeat, as distinguished from the long oral tradition of reciting poems from memory, to which lineation doesn’t readily apply.

A poem, as the best of your teachers should have taught, can rhyme, or not.

The definition of poetry, upon the other hand, and the question of how best to isolate its meaning, has confounded writers and philosophers for millennia. Leo Tolstoy captured the essence of this ancient question when he wrote the following:

Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse; prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books.

But my dear Mr. Tolstoy, though I know you’re being somewhat cheeky and somewhat not, I have a thought: even “business documents and school books” could in ultimate purport be poetic — I mean, couldn’t they? I don’t see why not.

Just as “love” is a word with enough powerful magic to make the true lover forget all its baser and falser usages, so “poetry” is a word for the true poet.

Thus wrote the poet-scholar Robert Graves, in his ferociously erudite book The White Goddess.

Essays on time get nowhere, except back where they all began.

So, too, with rime.

Because after you flense through all the rodomontade, with even the most speculative blade — after all the ink has spilled and dried and cracked — the question still remains perfectly intact:

What is poetry, in the last analysis?

Poetry is technique.

Poetry is crafted language.

Poetry is concentrated speech.

Poetry is density of expression, density of description, artfulness of articulation, felicitousness of phrasing.

Poetry is, as Auden said, “heightened language — language at its best.”

Poetry isn’t purple or pretentious or flowery language — or, at any rate, good poetry isn’t.

Poetry is craftsmanship.

Poetry is linguistic artfulness and verbal skill.

Poetry is euphony — the aurally pleasing combined with the intellectually clear. The poetic is the lyrical and the intelligible united.

Poetry is both the beauty and also meaning of language concentrated upon, focused upon, dwelt upon, even fawned over.

All of which applies to written and spoken poetry exactly the same.

Poetry, in sum, is style.

And style is technique, and technique is personality.

Wrote Mr. Oscar Wilde.