摘要:@@ What is poetry? Pressed for an answer, Robert Frost made a classic reply: "Poetry is the kind of thing poets write." In all likelihood,Frost was not trying merely to evade the question but to chide his questioner into thinking for himself. A trouble with definitions is that they may stop thought. The nature of poetry eludes simple definitions.Definitions will be of little help at first, if we are to know poetry and respond to it. We have to go to it willing to see and hear. To a particular poem, thousands of readers will have thousands of understandings. A poem can please us in many aspects. We usually concentrate our attention on its sound, wording, and figure of speech. In fact, a poem in stanzas can please us by its visual symmetry. This kind of poems is usually called the poems for the eye including spatial free verse and picture poems. Though many poets seem hardly to care about it, enough importance should be given to the visual element of poetry. At least some of our pleasure in silently reading a poem derives from the way it looks upon its page.