A summary of my views about poetry

Poetry

• Poetry is a wide genre - if someone tells me that they like Music I wouldn't know whether to play them Abba, Garage or Chopin. Even if they say they like Jazz, there's still a wide range. Similarly, the word "Poetry" is used to describe many types of text that (beyond the media used) have little in common. In particular their aesthetics may differ. A single poem can contain aspects of many of these subgenres, including prose genres.
• Poems can foreground typography (see Notation in poetry and music, Poetry punctuation, A theory of line-breaks), sound (see Choosing between sound and sense), discontinuity (see Juxtaposing text), spelling (see Strange Forms), shifts of tone and register (see Poetry, voice, and discourse analysis) or none of these (in which case if it's short it may well be described as prose - see Classifying - prose and cons). These features can interact with content and each other.
• I see few deep similarities (in particular regarding Truth) between poetry and maths/science (see Science and the Arts and Poetry, Mathematics, and Computing) but several with some other arts (see Art and narration and Art and poetry styles)
• The market affects the type of poetry written as well as published. In particular the fate of short texts has fluctuated over the years. See Adapting short texts for the market

Reading poetry

• Poetry appreciation is tainted by reputations and fashion, factors that are hard to disentangle from other, supposedly more literary features. Poetry is read by humans with different aesthetic profiles. Attention, Agility and Poetic Effects looks at the demands made on poetry readers.
• Poetry (like music but unlike a painting) is absorbed serially, patterns having to be built up by the reader. Ingarden and the Sense of Resolution considers what factors promote (or inhibit) this process.
• Novelty is attractive but relative. Readers who have not been exposed to loquacious people with mental problems, or to various avant-garde practices may not recognise how staid those methods are (though the poems may still be good). See Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation and Poetry, Madness and Cure
• Difficulty can be superficially attractive. See Difficulty and obscurity in poetry

Writing poetry

• Poetry writing is tainted by the desire to be liked, or read. It might be therapy. See The games poets play and Psychology, Psychiatry and Writers Groups.
• Intentionally or otherwise, the poet may use old devices on the reader (see Poeticisms, Charlatanism, Poetry and Art and The Great Poetry Hoax) or mask meaning from readers for dramatic effect, showmanship, or without realising that they're doing so (see Misdirection)