Camille Paglia says...

Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind. In college Greek class, I was amazed by the fragments of Archaic poetry - sometimes just a surviving phrase or line - that vividly conveyed the personalities of their authors, figures like Archilochus, Alcman and Ibycus, about whom little is known. The continuity of Western culture is demonstrated by lyric poetry.

hmm