poetry, nothing and everything

I've always felt that poetry is destroyed when scrutinised, analysed, divided into bits of phrases and words. It is also destroyed by our stubborn desire to link each metaphor, sound and image to the poet's existence. The artist's life is undoubtedly concealed in his/her work, but to seek the people behind his/her characters or the object of a poet's adulation is an insult and a superficial interpretation of art.  Poetry, of all arts, should be perceived as a feeling, a mood, a state and nothing more. 

Tomas Rivera explained it more beautifully than me:

Poetry is one of the most human of experiences because it begins with nothing. It is the birth and the death of the word and the poet, as he freezes abstractions, severs relationships with his utterances. Poetry is finding the search, finding the word. It is not inventing, but finding, starting the invention. Yet poetry should not be explained, categorized, studied, but read and felt and sung. Poetry denies the poet but not his expression and utterance. Poetry, then, is a way of becoming nothing and everything. In a way, poetry is and is not what Octavio Paz says: "knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment". Poetry gives me pure feelings - time, beauty, man and original death.