White Space Around Words, Metaphor and Poetry

I found a good general guide to writing poetry in "The Writers Way" by Sara Maitland, the following is an extract from her guide. On defining poetry she quotes T.S.Eliot when he suggested that poetry was "writing with a lot of white space around the words."


She goes on to say that" in poetry the words have a particular and heightened importance, poems are language constructions in a very direct way that prose is not. Sound, space, register and rhythm are foregrounded in poetry and above all the whole idea of metaphor is absolutely central to poetry. In poetry the idea that a word (phrase or sentence) can carry both it's own literal meaning, and when properly organised into a poem by the poet a whole set of other meanings as well, has a special primary importance.
Metaphor, at one level is simply one more rhetorical device. Metaphor compares two different things by speaking of one in terms of the other. Unlike a simile or an analogy which provides us with a way of saying that one thing is like another. "She looked like an Angel", a metaphor asserts that one thing is another thing. "You are an Angel", poetry impresses a particular rigour on the writer.
There is a craft discipline and a learning process that runs along tightly entwined in the other process of personal growth, experience and thought."