[I]f 'poetry' means the capacity of carrying tenderness, pity, wickedness to moments of extreme transparence, as if things passed through a light and there were no telling any more what substance they are made of, then Schulz is a poet. If poetry means fixing typical characters in typical circumstances, Schulz is a poet. If poetry means producing from everyday events, which we are accustomed to identify with the surface of things, a revelation that causes us to touch the depth of things, then, every so often, Schulz is a poet. And if poetry were merely finding a particular rhythm and improvising on it in a ceaseless adventure of infinitesimal variations, making a constantly new universe from the otherwise mechanical encounter of two or three elements, well, in this case, too, Schulz is a poet. More so than many others.
Umberto Eco (1963/1994) The world of Charlie Brown, in Umberto Eco, Apocalypse postponed, ed. Robert Lumley, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute, p. 36
