# Poetic Opacity **Opening (not a real abstract):** I Looking for the Essence of Poetry Analytic aesthetics, like analytic philosophy more broadly, has had an appetite for definitions. Textbooks and syllabi give disproportionate space to the question, “What is art?” It is no surprise, then, that analytic philosophers of poetry might ask, “What is poetry?” and we will follow suit. Our goal is to say something about the nature of poetry—something general enough that might capture a unifying feature of items that fall in the extension of that term. To contemporary readers, this might sound like a quaint, or perhaps even hopeless, endeavor. “Haven’t we moved past the days of definitions?” To address this anxiety, we will begin with some general remarks about why it’s not completely hopeless to search for a properly constrained search for the essence of poetry. We will then move **Authors:** [[Poetic Opacity]]