How is it that poetry cannot be considered an effective way of expressing the poets thoughts, feelings, and beliefs?
Because you cannot possibly know what the poet meant by any of it — it is too ambiguous. This ambiguity is built into the fact that a poem is a work of fiction. We can define the work of fiction as the kind of text that permits of no possible further dialogue. That is, you can tell the poet that you liked or didn’t like a poem, and you can even ask why the poet put a particular word in a poem, but you could not, for instance, tell Robert Frost — even if he were still alive — that he did not have miles to go before he slept, or that the horse did not mean anything by shaking his bells (since horses do not judge actions as mistakes) — without getting a smile and the only reasonable answer, which is this: but that’s how it is in the poem. Likewise, it is out of court to argue about whether the Little Bear really asked who had been sleeping in his bed. Those are already elements of the works of fiction in question (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,
