Why must I do poetry?

A famous poetry critic, upon reading a poem, once said 'I respond to it, but I have no idea what it actually means'. Poetry, by its very nature, is elusive. The disparate strands of meaning are woven into such a complex compression of words that the visual appearance of the stanzas on the page can be as revealing as the words themselves.

The beauty of poetry is that, like music, the rhyme and/or rhythmn of the syntax and structure evoke a natural, inexplicable response in any reader/listener. Once felt, this response can be built upon by a greater understanding of what the poem actually means. Such openness of interpretation is, arguably, one of the greatest pleasures of literary criticism.