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Poetry definitions are surely descriptive, so depend on intensional adequacy and also sense. > Descriptive definitions, like stipulative ones, spell out meaning, but they also aim to be adequate to existing usage. When philosophers offer definitions of, e.g., ‘know’ and ‘free’, they are not being stipulative: a lack of fit with existing usage is an objection to them. > It is useful to distinguish three grades of descriptive adequacy of a definition: extensional, intensional, and sense. A definition is *extensionally adequate* iff there are no actual counterexamples to it; it is *intensionally adequate* iff there are no possible counterexamples to it; and it is *sense adequate* (or *analytic*) iff it endows the defined term with the right sense. (The last grade of adequacy itself subdivides into different notions, for “sense” can be spelled out in several different ways.) The definition “Water is H2O,” for example, is intensionally adequate because the identity of water and H2O is necessary (assuming the Kripke-Putnam view about the rigidity of natural-kind terms); the definition is therefore extensionally adequate also. But it is not sense-adequate, for the sense of ‘water’ is not at all the same as that of ‘H2O’. The definition ‘George Washington is the first President of the United States’ is adequate only extensionally but not in the other two grades, while ‘man is a laughing animal’ fails to be adequate in all three grades. But then > analytic sentences are those whose truth can be *known *merely by knowing the meanings of the constituent terms, as opposed to having also to know something about the represented world Assuming that definitions of poetry say something about poets etc., then they are not analytic definitions, and have no sense. Definitions of poetry amount to nothing more than what can be classed as poetry. QED