The questions "what is poetry?" and "what is a poet?" are best answered by literary academics. They will probably have it that poetry is any pattern of words having a memorable emotional effect, and that poets are that small number of people who produce those words. Students of the history of the goddess offer very different answers: poetry, true poetry, like true music and true dance, is inspired in man by the goddess, and the man in whom it is inspired must be a very special, and very privileged person. In the original goddess temples, this man, whom we refer to generically as the High Poet, or by the only name of such an office-holder we have knowledge of, Homer, was the servant of the highest-placed living person, the High Priestess.

There is every indication that this interpretation of the nature and role of the poet has been a living tradition in the world of letters since the time of the Greeks. A great many poets, especially the great and famous ones, appear to have had a conscious and private relationship with the goddess. Further, they appear to have shared this insight one to the other, and to have passed it from generation to generation. This notion of a secret tradition among poets must remain as speculation, but it is certain that specific references to the goddess and her lore are to be found in Shakespeare; Marlowe, Spenser, Chaucer, Jonson, Goethe, Schiller, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, Rilke, Yeats, Brennan and Graves. Often, the reference takes the form of a hymn of praise, or the poet plainly declares himself a goddess-worshipper, as does Keats:

O  brightest! though too late for antique vows,
 Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
 Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retired
 From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
 Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
   Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
 From swingèd censer teeming:
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
 Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

The concept that poetry came from the Muses, rather than from the poet himself was widely understood in the 17th-19th centuries...witness the number of poems attributed to "Erato"...possibly because at that time most people who could write at all were familiar with the myths of classical Greece, but the great poets seemed to have arrived at a deeper understanding, namely that poetry was more than a profession or hobby...it was a personal relationship with the divine. This understanding included the idea that the enlightened poet was the goddess' chosen favourite, equivalent to the High Poet of the ancient temples, and to the sacrificial year-kings who were promised immortality and bliss.

  The poet Robert Graves makes an exposition of this in The White Goddess. He cites an Irish triad:

Tis death to mock a poet (because he has the power of great knowledge, and is the favourite of the Queen of Heaven, and so has supernatural powers)
Tis death to love a poet (because he is distracted by his affair with the goddess, and so makes a poor husband)
Tis death to be a poet (because he has made himself a sacrifice to the goddess)

Graves also informs us that poetry not only comes from the goddess, it serves to bring her near:

Graves defined true poets as those who were devoted to the Goddess, and observed that they could be ranked according to the beauty of the image of the Goddess in their verse. This opinion is one I share, but like the literary academics, you are entitled to your own:

And others..