ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four poems, and there will be, incidentally, a few
technical words introduced. Let’s start with those used for the title of this
book. This has two words for its subject. One is poetry, which comes from
a Greek word, poeisis, which means something made. A poet is a maker:
the word was used by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c.1460-1513) to
describe the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400). So we shall think of
poetry as the art of making something new, making it out of words, and if
words are considered to be nothing, making it out of nothing.
