In 1984, African American poet Audre Lorde described poetry as “the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change... the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” ([1984] 2007, 37). Lorde’s twentieth-century version of poets giving “name to the nameless” reverberates with exactly what poets from classical times onward have tried to express about their craft. The Ancient Greek word _poesis_, from which our modern word _poetry_ is derived, means “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before” (Polkinghome 2004, 115). Variations on _poesis_ survive in modern Spanish as _poesia_, in French as _poesie_, and in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as _poesi_. In Old English, however, the words for _poetry_—_sangcraeft_ (art of the song) and _léoðweorc_ (work of the lay)—emphasized the musicality of verse. The concepts of both music and naming the nameless are central to the _OED_’s definition of poetry as “the expression or embodiment of beautiful or elevated thought, imagination, or feeling, in language adapted to stir the imagination and emotions... such language containing a rhythmical element and having usually a metrical form.” The music of verse...