Does poetry offer a way to articulate ideas that otherwise cannot be explained in prose?

By murmuring and distilling ideas poetry can be disquieting. It is served by many registers of silence compared to prose through the discretions of enjambment, pauses, ellipses, line breaks. A poem can reach the interstices of thought; it can traverse spatial boundaries, gear shifting and fast-tracking by turns through tone, fragmentation, rhythm, metonymy and metaphor. This makes it a powerful language for communicating the heterogeneous and paradoxical.

There is a desire and an implicit expectation that narrative and history will emplot causality and temporal order: this goes back to Aristotle and theories of narratology. Experimental fiction might be able to bend the chronological frame, or adopt a rhizomic sequence to expose the artifice of realism, but rarely can it abandon structure entirely as a poem can. This gives poetry ontological freedom and, of course, this is alluring to poets since they are rebels at heart.