Part of poetry’s power is its magical, seemingly sacred, unreachable references, as contrasted, for instance, with the mundanity of news articles’ banal, commonplace orientations. Likewise, though both balladry and straightforward compiling are products of human endeavor, collective norms establish different ends for the two. Poesy and essays might cover the same topics, as exemplified, repeatedly, by the literatures of war, emancipation, and marriage, but they differ in predictable ways.