I love this description of poetry by the famous Science Fiction author Dan Simmons:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it commented on, but there’s a great affinity between writing poetry and SF. As with poetry, quality speculative fiction demands great skill with language and invites linguistic invention. As with poetry, good SF delves deep into metaphor while sliding lightly on the surface of its own joy of telling. As with poetry, quality SF demands a much greater collaboration on the part of the reader — a greater sensitivity to detail, word-meaning, texture, and nuance, as well as a greater involvement in ferreting out meaning.

My favorite commentator on things literary — Harold Bloom — has said that the common element to all great literature, from Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe through Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain — is an ineffable quality of “strangeness.” By that he doesn’t mean deliberate post-modern weirdness or Ken Kesey wonkiness, but rather an indescribable, out-of-its-own-time, deep-to-the-literary-marrow differentness that great prose and poetry carries in itself and conveys to successive generations. It tends to mix the sacred and the profane, the profound and the entertaining, in a way that helps us to redefine ourselves and our cultures. The most ambitious of speculative fiction has a taste of that delicious strangeness, for both the writer and the reader.

Yeah, Bloom is definitely an insightful thinker on things literary. I often wonder about his hypothesis that the bible was just inspired writing and was never meant to be the basis for dogma.