Just as one cannot land on a precise definition of poetry one cannot say what exactly the themes to be dealt with in poetry. It can be noticed that a poem can be composed on everything and everyone.
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Poetic imagination has the magical power to transform every common, ordinary emotion or experience into an extraordinary piece of poetry some are, however, of the opinion that poetry is not a suitable medium for all experiences and purposes. But the poet is not concerned with imparting factual information. He is concerned with his feelings about places, people and events etc. it is not the individual, it is the poet speaking through the poem.
The poet’s eye sees beyond the eyes of the man in him. Poetry addresses itself to a world that is beyond the world of humdrum existence, the world of dull routine and drudgery. For the poet the sun and the moon are not mere astronomical bodies. For him they are living entities. He sees in them what a physicist or an astronomer fails to see.
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The moon is not mere satellite of the earth. It is a bride, clad in silver, walking slowly and shyly on its airy path. The poet’s fancy of poetic imagination or fancy that gives a local habitation and a name to ‘airy nothings.’
To conjure up a world of beauty, strangeness and wonder is, however, the only concern of a poet. Apart from achieving this, the poet also seeks to interprete life and has to succeed in doing so. Life is not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and glory signifying nothing. It has its colours, its beauty.
A poet sees immortality in the death of warrior or soldier. He sees heaven in love. He seeks to discover the relationship between man and man, man and nature, man and God and nature and God. He is not always an ivory tower observer.
Quite often he is keen observer of men and manners and takes the role of a severe critic human affairs and human conduct with a view to bringing about heaven on the earth. Poetry a form of literature is after all a criticism of life as life shapes itself in the mind of the interpreter. The poet, through his poem, seeks to find essence in existence. Not withstanding the ‘Art for art’s sake’ theory or the theory of ‘aesthetics’ the poet has to serve an end, beyond providing ‘delight.’