Craft: What is the function of poetry?

Bishop, Grossman, Bronk, Niedecker, Shakespeare, Frost

This column was a request by one of The Sharpener readers. If you have a suggestion of topics for future columns, please let me know here:

Elizabeth Bishop:

Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural.

Allen Grossman described in a 1990 lecture when poetry in the West was born. Hesiod was walking up Mount Helicon and c…