I may have just discovered an essential element of poetry through reading, of all people, Sylvia Plath. I never understood before when people said things like, "poetry's medium is pure language". Now I do, I think. If the purpose of art is to generate feelings, then poetry does this not with ideas or stories or sounds or images, although it may use these insofar as language is connected with them; but it is the language itself that generates the feelings.