Poetry has been produced by every civilization in history, and it shows no sign of losing its power in our time. Ours may be, as we are often told, a prosaic age or a scientific age, but it is also an age in which a great quantity of poetry is written. It may ultimately prove to be one of the great eras of poetic creation. The remarkable durability of the poetic tradition and the intensification of poetic composition in times of critical transition€€the Renaissance and the twentieth century€€indicate that poetry is closely related to mankind's deepest concerns. It not only records and comments on events, but also helps define our responses to them. Its special province is emotion€€what Henry James once called "the felt sense of life."

One source of poetry's viability is its remarkable power to adapt to changing circumstances. As it once took in its stride the great exploring carried out in the astonishing ocean-going vessels of the fifteenth century, so it has now assimilated the airplane and the rocket. But poetry can accommodate itself to new ways of living because it is also an expression of the unchanging and universal essence of human experience.

One result of poetry's constant stretching and shifting to cover the elastic shape of life is the appearance of new forms of expression without loss of the old ones. E. E. Cummings has done startling things with the shape of language without preventing anyone else's writing in traditional verse patterns. Still the nature of poetry is unchanged by its growing diversity of forms. We may still define it as the interpretive dramatization of experience in metrical language.

Poetry shares many qualities with other forms of writing, but it also has many distinctive characteristics which present certain initial difficulties to the reader. Hence we are concerned in this handbook with developing skill in reading. Here is a fairly simple, well-known poem that will give us an opportunity at the outset to observe both the similarities and differences between poetry and other writing:

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