Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry

In light of the enormous variety of poetic traditions we find around the world and across the ages, any attempt at finding a defining feature of poetry that would encompass all and only poems would seem to be in vain. What can Stabat Mater, Beat poetry, Shakespeare's sonnets, Goethe's Faust, and Japanese haiku possibly have in common? Attempts to provide positive accounts, with necessary or sufficient reasons for what counts as a poem, often meet with the counterexamples that human creativity is wont to produce. Consider these excerpts from two twentieth‐century poems. Are there any commonalities between the Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze's “Without Love” and the Mexican Octavio Paz's “The Poet”? [transliterated:] usiKvarulod mze ar sufevs ts‐is kamaraze, sio ar dahqris, T‐Ke ar krteba sasixarulod … El hombre es el alimento del hombre. El saber no es distinto del soñar, el soñar del hacer. La poesía ha puesto fuego a todos los poemas. Se acabaron las palabras, se acabaron las imágenes. Abolida la distancia entre el nombre y la cosa, nombrar es crear, e imaginar, hacer.1