A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
— e.e. cummings, “A Poet’s Advice to Students”

To be ourself in a world that wants us to fall in line isn’t easy. After all, we are part of the tribe, the community, and the history of humanity. All that we see and encounter draws something out of us that we may not have felt otherwise. Just where is that line where the average of everyone else get crossed to simply, “ourself”? Remember in such moments this line in the quote above, “whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”

To feel is the thing. Nobody else feels what we feel. Nobody else brings the whole of their experience together, stirs it about in their soul and exudes the identity that is us. Nobody but us. So it follows that we ought to be aware of what we’re feeling, not just what we’re hearing and seeing and reading. What we feel hints at who we are. Give that room to breathe and grow.

Most of us don’t fancy ourselves poets. Yet we may live a poetic life full of heightened awareness of the self and all that surrounds and influences us. Poetry is feeling. To “squeeze the marrow out of life” as Henry David Thoreau put it, we must be fully aware and alive. Give life a squeeze. See how it feels. Learn and grow and become nobody else but yourself.