[Suzerain of Sheol]

On the subject of poetic criticism, I find this a rather interesting read, though it isn't exactly in line with my thoughts on the matter.

I suppose I'm something of a poetic nihilist, in that I see poetry as a dead form of art, something engaged in for wholly self-indulgent purposes. There are, sadly, far, far more poets in the world then there are readers of poetry. I could go off on a tangent about how writing of any kind comes down to communication (and, more fundamentally, community), semantic structures providing a medium through which ideas can be exchanged, but, as I said, I feel that poetry in the last century has become entirely saturated and lost to all relevance. To make an example of what you said, it is, in many ways, about the poet's emotions, in that it is a pursuit mired largely in vanity, and at best, a quasi-artistic hobby. It doesn't, and hasn't in a long time, communicate much of anything beyond the poet's state of mind at the time of the writing. A curiosity.

That isn't to say there's no room for discussion, however. Honestly, the only sort of recognition a poet is going to get in our postmodern age is among his or her peers. In that sense, it remains a dialogue, albeit one of particularly colloquial parameters. You can represent poets as a subsection of the human system engaging in a form of discourse unique to themselves, and could derive sufficient semantic merit from that to call poetry a kind of art, but outside that circle of relevance, poetry simply falls away. And if you deny that very dialogue, you're left with only the poet in stasis, isolated in a room of mirrors. Ideas can't mature or evolve without communication.