Maybe essays and poems are two sides of the same coin
I’m starting to think that maybe essays and poems are two sides of the same coin, where they’re both attempts to explain things, but an essay is what you get when you follow a thread through to the end, and a poem is what you get when you can’t quite isolate the thread and you don’t know where it ends.
I think fiction has a slightly different purpose. It’s for the things that need to be expressed but probably shouldn’t be explained outright.