What is poetry? The essential qualities of poetry are economy or compactness, concereteness or “particularness,” and intensity… What makes poetry unique is that it exists in and through words; language is its medium, as movement is that of dance, sound that of music, and line and color that of painting… An ever-closer attention to words – to individual words – develops a feeling for language that makes possible the discovery of poetry and enable us to hear the voices of poetry.