Can poetry be used to express deeply philosophical ideas?

Poetry can certainly be used to express profound ideas and attitudes concerning (for want of a better expression) 'the human condition'. These ideas can affect the reader's soul in a powerful way, helped along by the captivating power of the medium itself. And examples of poetry that might be regarded as 'philosophical' in this sense are innumerable. Indeed, one might make a case for claiming that it's the norm rather than the exception, and that this is the primary aspiration of most of the greatest poetry in history, from Homer to Dante to Sylvia Plath. But does this really count as philosophy? For some people, this is precisely what the best and most important kind of philosophy consists in. For others, however, and particularly within English-speaking academia, philosophy is more a matter of highly technical and abstract theories about the structure of reality, the nature of cognition, and things of that sort. And yet, as it turns out, those kinds of theories have been explored in verse...