I recently encountered yet another online article setting out a definition of poetry. But this one startled me by including the statement 'a poem doesn't need to have a meaning'. No explanation was provided, leaving me befuddled. I was going to say 'bemused', but that would imply a magical and productive confusion invoked by the muse, whereas this was just having my thoughts brought up short by a brick wall of incomprehension.2 If a newspaper article had no meaning, would you bother to read it? Probably not. What then makes poetry special in this way? Nothing, I suspect, unless one's become enslaved to the dictates of fashion, where 'anything we approve of goes (because we say so)'.

Therefore, without false modesty or apology I'm offering my own definition of poetry, which I hope will resonate with many. But first, the basics. Writing of any kind serves just one legitimate purpose – the communication of ideas. Whether it's instructions for operating the new washing machine or a novel by a famous author, it's the message that offers most to the reader, and that message is communicated using words with agreed meanings.3 Presentation can clarify the message, which is why a novel is divided into sentences, paragraphs and chapters, but these merely assist interpretation of the words, they can't substitute for it. A book full of beautifully laid out random sequences of words would be no use (and probably of little interest) to most readers unless they'd been conditioned to believe it was Great Literature. In that case their response would not be to the book as such, but to a social construct (the desire to conform) within which the book would be a mere prop.

So here's my definition, and it's very simple. Poetry is a mechanism 4 for heightening the expression of ideas beyond the immediately obvious interpretation of the words used. It follows that 'to mean or not to mean?' is not the question. Poetry is fundamentally a matter of meanings, in the absence of which printed words are mere blobs and squiggles and spoken words – mere noise.

 [1] with apologies to Will.

 [2] although denying the necessity of meaning is not an entirely novel position. It would seem that Lewis Carroll was taking a satirical jab at it in the Jabberwocky poem and Humpty Dumpty's interpretation of it (Through the Looking Glass, 1871).

 [3] Even Islamic calligraphy, which creates visual imagery using ornamental characters, relies fundamentally for its effect on the meaning of the words represented.

 [4] and consequently a tool kit of proven techniques