Defining Poetry

This morning I felt an urge to muse the definition of poetry.  What is poetry?  Is it one specific thing, confined to rules and organization?  Or is it a garden of beauties meant to influence from within and without?  A rose bush can be regarded and can effect in many different ways.  It might represent life or personify love.  It's thorns may depict strength as well as pain.  In it's presence some may see color or folds of fragility, while others will be moved only by the sweet aroma it spills into the air.  Yet it is life and sustains life.  It has roots which twine into the earth that both feed and nurture.  There is more then what the senses allow.

That to me, defines poetry.

The moment art, beauty, nature, captures you, pulls you, pushes you, the instant you change for something around you, or because of it, you experience poetry.

I have been stirred by sweeps of color on canvas, by literature that rolls like thunder or a tugging tide.  Music will lift or move me to tears, and the glint of an eye or the tilt of a smile can harm or heal me.

This is poetry.  And those who inspire it, those who have the power to hold it and bring it, make it new again and again, these are the poets.

Whether it be by rhyme, word, or reason, the Masters need not follow a rule to create poetry.  They simply follow their hearts.