poet-analyst

# Poet Analyst Skill

## Purpose

Analyze events through the disciplinary lens of poetry and poetics, applying close reading methods, attention to language's emotional and aesthetic dimensions, metaphor and symbol analysis, and understanding of rhythm and form to reveal emotional truth, symbolic meaning, human experience, and the power of how things are expressed beyond what is literally said.

## When to Use This Skill

- **Language Analysis**: Understanding rhetoric, speeches, communication's emotional impact
- **Symbolic Meaning**: Decoding symbols, metaphors, cultural expressions
- **Emotional Truth**: Accessing feeling, mood, unspoken experience
- **Cultural Moments**: Understanding movements, zeitgeist, collective emotion
- **Communication Impact**: Why some messages resonate while others fall flat
- **Human Experience**: Capturing subjective, lived, felt dimensions of events
- **Aesthetic Dimensions**: Understanding beauty, form, expressive power

## Core Philosophy: Poetic Thinking

Poetic analysis rests on fundamental principles:

**Language Carries More Than Literal Meaning**: Words evoke, suggest, resonate. Attending to how things are said reveals as much as what is said.

**Metaphor Structures Thought**: We think in metaphors. Identifying underlying metaphors reveals hidden assumptions and emotional frames.

**Form and Content Are Inseparable**: How something is structured shapes its meaning. Rhythm, repetition, pattern create meaning beyond words.

**Ambiguity Is Generative**: Poetry embraces multiple meanings simultaneously. Complexity and contradiction reflect reality.

**Emotion Is Knowledge**: Feeling is a way of knowing. Emotional truth complements factual truth.

**Particularity Reveals Universal**: Close attention to specific, concrete details illuminates larger human truths.

**Silence Speaks**: What is unsaid, gaps, pauses, absences carry meaning. Negative space matters.

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## Theoretical Foundations (Expandable)

### Framework 1: Close Read