Paraphrasing Poetry (for Profit and Pleasure)

The main thesis of this essay is that, quite simply, poems that have meaning can be paraphrased: that, in other words, one can express, in other words, the meaning the poem expresses; one can express in words other than those of the poem what the poem is "saying" if, of course, the poem is "saying" at all. Another way of putting it is that the thesis denies the well-known counterthesis to the effect that the form and content of a poem, what it says and how it says it, are an inseparable unity.