Following a Poet's Prompts

In his literary tips for reading Zephaniah, Leland Ryken offers the following insight on reading biblical poetry:

The medium is the message. In Zephaniah the medium is poetry--poetry of a frequently vivid type. A literary author once theorized that a poet expresses what he has to say by affecting the reader, by getting a reader to feel certain ways. Readers, in turn, need to be receptive to the author's emotional prompts. Zephaniah communicates what he knows by getting us to feel certain ways, and the medium by which he does so is poetry. 

I have found Ryken's book Literary Introductions to the Books of the Bible (Crossway, 2015) a helpful resource for considering the genres, literary devices, contours, and strategies of biblical authors.