Hi Janet
Of course the songs of Benjamin Britten are "poetic" -- for the very reason that they are poems set to music, which is the case with his song cycle based on Thomas Hardy's "Winter Words" or his settings of Michelangelo's sonnets. Perhaps I am stating the obvious here, but these are not instances of these pieces being written as songs, but as poems first that were secondly reinterpreted as songs by a composer at some later time. I assume the same applies to the pieces by Brahms and the other composers that you mentioned.
All the best
Chris
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