What is poetry? A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines is the usual answer. Will that do?

Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was a responsible attempt to understand the world in human terms through literary composition.

The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained  they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.

Discussion - What distinguishes poetry from other literary compositions? Nothing, says a vociferous body of opinion: they are all texts, to be understood by the same techniques as a philosophic treatise or tabloid newspaper. But that makes sense only to readers of advanced magazines, for poetry does indeed seem different. Even if we accept that poetry can be verse or prose verse simply having a strong metrical element  poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply. In fact, for all but Postmodernists, it is an art form, and must therefore do what all art does  represent something of the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as something autonomous and self-defining.

No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry?

One point worth making is that aesthetics, together with theories of poetics and literary criticism, does not operate in a vacuum, but within a community of shared approaches and understandings. Typically, they are academia-based, and so written for fellow academics and their captive students. Their insights are important, indeed indispensable, for countering the half-truths that float around the poetry world, and for insisting that poetry maintain some depth and substance, but the young poet may wish initially to sidestep these abstruse matters and join another community, that of poetry itself. Poetry also has its beliefs and patterns of excellence. Its insights have to be acquired by participation: by writing and having that writing evaluated by fellow poets, by being able to appreciate a wide range of work, and by acquiring the crafts of literary composition.