Stresses

I am a woman of troublingly conservative tastes, at least when it comes to understanding poetry (which is a metaphor for all lived things). So I find little to add to Cleanth Brooks’s 1949 definition of poetic structure:

The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the “statement” which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.

The Well-Wrought Urn (1949), p. 203

This illustrates exactly why poetry is a metaphor for all lived things, for what is life other than learning to balance and resolve and harmonise all the things that stress us out?

This is very well concluded, given that Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism with which he was associated are primarily known for divorcing poetry from life. The well-wrought urn is a window-less monad, untouched by the messy matter of being human.