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What Is Poetry? What is poetry?
We use the word objectively, to
mean a specific category, and subjectively, to mean a general aesthetic
value. A book of poetry, for
example, is a specific category. But how objective is it? Do we agree what it
means? Why is a poem a poem? The
poetry of Tarkovsky’s films
is an aesthetic value. But which is more meaningful, the specific category or
the general value? And how does the value relate to the category? I believe that
most people know instinctively what poetry is, though they may not be able to
explain what they know. I wonder if the common criticism of contemporary
poetry, it isn’t poetry because it
doesn’t rhyme, is a good example of this. If so, contemporary poets
should stop before they sneer. Would they rather be told, I can’t put it in words, but I know
instinctively that your poem isn’t poetry? Milton’s Paradise Lost doesn’t rhyme either, but no one would say it isn’t
poetry. Contemporary
poets, if anything, are the opposite. Many of them are articulate about what
they think poetry is, but it isn’t an instinctive knowledge. It is an
intellectual definition of poetry that leads to a black hole of meaning. A poem is a poem if the author says it is
a poem. Or its amateur equivalent: A poem So what is a poem? What
defines its specific category? What differentiates it from a short story, for
example, or a philosophical aphorism? A poem, indeed, may be a short story or
a philosophical aphorism, so why do we still call it a poem? A poem is a
text that is written in verse, not prose. So the next question is, what is
the difference between verse and prose? In English poetry, from Chaucer until
modernism, this was easy to answer. Verse had a metre. But free verse is verse
too. The opening stanzas, for example, of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts aren’t metric, but they
are certainly verse. They are poetry, and magical poetry too. So, if the
essential ingredient of verse isn’t rhyme or metre, or line breaks in a
sentence, what is it? It is rhythm. A rhythm that is specific to poetry, just
as there is a rhythm specific to prose. A rhythm that anyone can read aloud. One way to
define this is to say that, in prose, every word counts. In poetry, every
syllable counts. Though even that is being generous to spoken prose. Try
saying this line, from Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
in the prose of normal speech: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? and as verse,
floating thee against the beat: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Which is
quicker? Which breathes? Which is seductive? In my opinion, as prose, it is a
straight question and rather silly. It is clipped. Its emotions are
constricted. As verse, as poetry, it is anything but. I will mention
an exception, which, hopefully, proves the rule. The rhythm of Yeats’ poem He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven is
clearly a prose rhythm, not a verse rhythm. And it uses prosaic repetitions
instead of rhymes. The effect this has is to ground a poem that might
otherwise have been fey or effete. The prose makes it poetry. Another way to
define the different rhythms of prose and poetry is to say that prose speaks
and poetry sings. Singing is a resonant physical experience, in a way that
speaking isn’t. So is poetry. And in order to resonate, a poem must be a
physical thing. It must breathe, it must have a body. In my opinion,
anyone who is embarrassed by the resonance, the song, of poetry, who doesn’t
want that excitement, or who doesn’t want to accept the simple reality that
poetry sings, should really not be writing poetry. I should also
say here, since most people are more familiar with song lyrics than they are
with poems, that the two are completely different. A song lyric may be
poetic, but it is an art form, a specific category, of its own. It isn’t a
poem. A poem includes everything that a song lyric leaves to the music. The
rhythm, the harmonies, the mood, the structure. A song lyric isn’t a song. A
poem is. What rhymes is
different too. In singing, vowels predominate. In the spoken verse of poetry,
consonants are equally important. For example, why and mine are vowel
half-rhymes. If you sing them, something happens. They rhyme. If you say
them, they run alliteratively, but they don’t have the impact of a rhyme. In
contrast, mine and mean are consonant half-rhymes. If you
sing them, nothing happens. If you say them, they have an impact, an energy. When we read a
new poem, then, we can ask a few questions. Is it really poetry? Is it verse?
Is its rhythm verse or prose (pace
the Yeats poem)? Does it sing? Is it a physical thing? In my opinion,
many contemporary poems aren’t really poetry at all. They are fragments of
prose. They may be literary and interesting, but they belong to another
specific category and it confuses, and possibly discourages, potential
readers of poetry to call them poems. Perhaps we should call them prosettes and
their authors proseurs... I also think it
is much harder to write free verse, free verse that sings, than it is to
write metric verse. The poets who are able to do so are usually those who
know how to write metric verse, who bring its rhythmic habit into free verse.
An obvious example would be the free verse in the metric ruins of Eliot’s The Waste Land. So that is
poetry objectively, as a specific category. A poem is a song. What about
subjectively, as a general aesthetic value? We talk about the poetry of a
film or a novel, the slow movement of a concerto, or Arsenal’s passing game.
We may be describing the content or the style, for example, the melody of a
concerto or the way a pianist plays it, but what we always mean is its effect
on us. And while we may describe poetry in content or style as lyrical or beautiful, in its effect on us, it is sublime. So what is a
sublime experience? What do we experience and with what do we experience it?
A sublime experience is an experience of the soul, or, if you prefer, of the
transcendent being, of the subjective self. The soul experiences it and, in
doing so, we experience the soul. That is what that instant of exhilaration is. In my opinion,
since this is what poetry means in films or football, it should certainly
apply to poems too. Poems should be lyrical and beautiful. Poems should be
sublime. It applies to political poems and comic poems too. They should still
surprise or shock or tickle the soul. In the snap of a rhythm or the smile of
a rhyme. That is why they are poems. And they are all the more effective for
it. It isn’t the
subject of a poem that is sublime, it is the structure. It is the structure
that articulates an experience of the soul. That is what the techniques of
poetry are for, that is the spiritual knowledge behind them. That is the
effect of metre, rhyme, alliteration, of a sonnet or an ode. A poem is a
physical expression of the soul in words. In fact, the objective
and subjective meanings of poetry include one another. By singing, poetry is
sublime. By being sublime, poetry sings. I will ask the
question again. What is poetry? It is a song. It is an experience of the
soul. In a single phrase, it is a song of the soul. Incidentally,
my own poem, A Song Of The Soul (New Poems (2006)), explores how ethereal or earthy this song might be. In my opinion,
to be able to write poetry, we need to have a clear experience of the soul.
We need to experience the poetry of the soul, or at least the soul of poetry.
Then we know what poetry is and we can start to learn how to write it. Which
means learning how the soul expresses itself physically, in language, in the
other arts, in the body, in the world. Poetry, I would
say, is England’s greatest contribution to the arts of the world. I believe
it is important to keep that tradition alive, by continuing to write poetry
that is true to the spirit of that tradition. Doing so, perhaps, will also
help poetry to find its audience again and its importance in contemporary
culture. If people do know instinctively what poetry is, how will they
respond to a poetry that shares that instinct? To a poetry that is
confidently, resonantly poetic? |
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