What is poetry?

... Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you.

Of letting your heart be traversed by the dictated

dictation. In a single trait - and that's the impos-

sible, that's the poematic experience. You did not

yet know the heart, you learn it thus. From this

experience and from this expression. I call a poem

that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the

heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to

mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily

discern from the word itself. Heart, in the poem

'learn by heart'  (to be learned by heart), no longer names only pure interiority, independent

spontaneity, the freedom to affect oneself ac-

tively by reproducing the beloved trace... (Jacques Derrida, What is poetry?)