According to Boccaccio, some people believed the sins of some to be the cause of the plague. They believed that God punished them for committing sins by giving them the plague
While a definition of 'power' may be needed, one could argue that poetry has a specific type of power, related to the transmission of experience. Humanity's first approaches to culture communication were done on verse, in the form of poetry (as one can see on the different<em> chansons de geste </em>around Europe, Homeric poems and Greek theatre, and the folklore of orient, for example). Poetic language can transmit human experiences; it can, through the use of verse, of repetition and other poetic devices, cultivate the memory of a particular experience, moment or emotion in a way that prose, due to its to novelty and information, can´t.
