Is he a poet, or a philosopher? I've been accused of both. I like to think that I'm both, the aggregate not really unusual. Surely, the serious poet is examining what it is to be a poet, and realizing that poetry, not doggerel or birthday greeting verse, involves looking not so much inside as outside, into the incomprehensible vast he or she inhabits and struggles to express. Let me add, not to express the puny being doing the composing,not, in effect, the narcissistic self-display which passes for the Parnassian in today's world. So, yes, I consider myself both. In my book, figures of speech, descriptive passages, explicit analyses of being, of the essence in which the poet and the reader exist, unroll.
The poet leads the reader into a new understanding of what it means to be and of the complexity of what I is is. Some readers will be bored, some confused, but some will feel their being enlivened and enlarged. I hope YOU are one of those.