It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
“Aye, I'm tellin' ye, happiness is one of the few things in this world that doubles every time you share it with someone else.”
“Having come up in the era where movies are only movies if they're released in the theater... I don't know if that holds true anymore. I've been involved in some movies that have gone 'direct-to-video,' and that used to not be a good thing, but now it's different.”