Why did Johann Gottfried von Herder believe poetic ability was not limited to educated people?

Johann Gottfried von Herder believed that poetic ability was not limited to the educated because he viewed poetry as a natural, involuntary reaction to the human environment rather than a product of formal learning or deliberate artifice.1

For Herder, poetry was the "mother tongue of mankind," a creative function of language that reveals hidden aspects of life. He argued that this ability appears in its greatest purity and power during the "uncivilized" or primitive periods of a nation's history. By emphasizing that poetic expression is rooted in the "voice of feeling"—the sounds, stresses, and rhythms of speech—he moved away from the Enlightenment view that poetry was a refined skill reserved for the educated elite. Instead, he identified this creative capacity as an inherent part of human nature, evidenced by the profound poetic power found in ancient works such as the Old Testament, the Edda, and the epics of Homer.213