I'm going to respond briefly to Ezra's arguments against my poets/critics distinction. I hope to show how our positions differ, but also that we are not in as much disagreement as he suggests.
On the question of what poetry is: as a literary theorist, I first have to insist that poetry, the kind that critics study, is primarily an artifact of language. Poetry is a particular form of language. From a Formalist viewpoint, it is language that is at some level talking about itself, whatever else it may be about.
This description is somewhat disingenuous in the context of my previous post, however, since I was using poetry metaphorically (as I think Ezra does in his response) to describe a number of different actions and expressions. In that wider sense, I agree with Ezra that poetry is "a quality of grace…a kind of victory." This is the more general creative impulse that I group under the name "poetry" in my post.
On to the question of whether poetry is "a mixture of critical and aesthetic focus," whether "every good work of art practices criticism." I want to clarify, first, that I am not using criticism to describe the practice of evaluation, but rather a practice of organization. That said, I appreciate Ezra's argument that poetry practices criticism of the world. Much poetry is undoubtedly a practice of organization of features of the world; an attempt to understand and explain it.
Perhaps the distinction I'm trying to make is more between the particular and the universal. In my experience, creative work explains the world in terms of a particular event, a particular description, a particular instance. The work I would call criticism tries to draw generalities from the works of art. (Works of poetry can perform criticism by expressing generalities as well, but I think it is less common.) I think the difference in focus, on generalizing or explaining creatively by example, is more important to the distinction than whether a work is a "poem" or not.
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