Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the thoughts and the poems, many of which are new to me. Strong stuff!
I've done a bad job of communicating. I've appeared to ask whether short poems can have emotional impact, and to doubt that they can--a banal question, a silly doubt.
Most of the poems cited, emotionally impactful as they clearly are, strike me as taking an intellectual approach, but that distinction may not be meaningful to anyone other than me.
So as not to evade the issue I raise, despite my new doubt that the issue is of interest, I'll illustrate.
Suzanne Buffam's "On Suicide" (People who commit suicide don’t fail to believe in life./They fail to believe in death.) (post#9) makes its emotional impact by sharing an idea. A strong idea. A poetic idea. But an idea. Ideas are intellectual. The poem impacts me emotionally only because I apply the idea to a specific (hypothetical) suicide, whose loss I feel.
Maybe that's how the shortest poems make their emotional impact, by being strong enough to make the reader willing to supply the specifics.
Even the Housman (post#4), which strikes me as less intellectual than most of the others, operates that way. I supply the young men.
Again, thanks to those who've shared thoughts and poems. And to anyone who has further to share.
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