What is poetry?

By John Robert Lee

An approach to poetry: “0ne person talking to another.” ~ T S Eliot

“What every poet starts from is his own emotions.” ~ T S Eliot

“…the credibility of this honoured but hard to define category of human achievement called poetry.” ~ Seamus Heaney

Introduction

Full disclosure: I have not been, consciously anyway, overly obsessed with the question “What is poetry?” I have tended to avoid a certain wrestling angst, contemplation of my poet-navel, a raising of Romantic anxiety, where this is concerned. While I suspect I can find certain subconscious reflections in myself on “the poetic”, “Poetry” and related queries, I have just gone about the business of writing poems. The proof that I have not been as complacent as I might sound is that often, at poetry readings, I have remarked to friends nearby, “Where is the poetry?” Behind that complaint lies some formulation of what poetry ought to be.

I have also tended to use “poetry”, “the poetic”, to describe other kinds of art. For example, when I have been moved by a really fine dance performance, the best way I can describe it, is as “poetry.” In my poem ‘elemental’, I have written of “those sexy dancers/barrelling through space,/arching, escalating over breath,” my attempt to capture a certain breath-stopping moment of the poetry of dance.

But, what is poetry? Well, most fundamentally it is a literary form, distinct from prose or drama (though obviously there are similarities, overlaps, continuities between and within those). The form of the poem (leaving room for experimentation etc.) is distinct. It is a literary structure marked uniquely by its diction and particular use of language, usually heightened (even in plain statement); its metric and rhythmic patterns, including that created by use of the breath to shape the line; the use of image, symbol and metaphor. Its concentration of content and form, its distillation of message and meaning, not only underlines the uniqueness of poetry, but makes it enormously challenging both to write and unravel. If writing is discovered by the serious writer to be hard work, demanding thought, technical skill and an awareness of the literary tradition in which and out of which one is writing, then the creative writing of good poetry is even more daunting.

TRUTH

If I have any kind of philosophy that guides my approach to understanding and writing of poetry, it can be summed up as “Truth, Beauty and Harmony.” From the ancient Greeks to Rabindranath Tagore, Eastern philosophers to more recent critics, these have been discussed and debated and discarded in their various permutations. My adoption of “Truth, Beauty and Harmony” has more to do with a certain technical achievement than a philosophical view. Usually included are “Order” and “Moral goodness,” but these are absorbed, I think, in Harmony and Truth.

Anyway, for me, poetry should speak “Truth.” The reader should put down the poem with the response, “Yes, this is true. It is a true recording, reflection of an emotion or experience or insight that I recognise.” Or the sense (even if the full meaning escapes the reader) that the poem carries the “ring of truth.” If the poet is posturing, if they have not fully explored the reality of the experience, emotion or insight, the poem will come over as false, will be sentimental sham. Eliot says, “What every poet starts from is his own emotions.” But those emotions ought to be searched most deeply, and via the right words, images, rhythms, as the poet seeks to capture the truth of his feelings, linked closely to experience and insight. And capturing this truth is very much a technical matter, since it is word and image and sound that will hold in a delicate vase the truth the poet desires to share.  Eliot brings it right down to basic fundamentals: after all the hype, “poetry remains…one person talking to another.” Here, echoes of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Related to this he says: “the poem comes before the form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something.”  How we say, how we speak, is the craft and crafting of poetry.

The poet should struggle to this point of a kind of revelatory truth. Even when (s)he does not want to go there! To write truth will involve a self-exposure that can be uncomfortable and many writers stop short before the deep implications of truth dug for, found in all its nakedness, and brought up like a blood-soaked, squealing baby, from the womb of the suffering entailed in such searching of one’s innards. If one has been honest, and has desired to write true, and to present it as unambiguously as possible, one has begun to write poems that will last beyond the first flush of creative endeavour.

But to be complete, the poem must proceed.

BEAUTY

Secondly, Beauty. One can find beautifully written prose and beautiful drama. Beauty shows forth in those forms. But poetry, even more, should carry a beauty about it. And that beauty is bottled, as it were, distilled, sharp-edged. It is the beauty of the line, its rhythm, its image, that will hold the attention. That will stay in the mind long after — even when one is writing about grim matters, death, depression, brutality, infidelities, heartbreak, etc. The poet must speak of these with a beauty that carries the emotion powerfully to the heart and mind of the reader or hearer. The emotion of sadness or horror at some evil written of, or the heart-lifting joy evoked by love, or nostalgia or whatever, must be written in beauty, or it will not fully succeed. I don’t see a contradiction here. Is this not the secret of the catharsis of Shakespearean and other great dramatic tragedy?

Poets more than prose writers speak of “the line.” It is “the line” that must hold the beauty of the expression of emotion, experience, insight. It is the beauty of expression that packages the truth and makes it hold our attention. As with holding, containing truth, beauty is of course captured in the line and stanza by the very practical and mundane matters of technical skill. Again, it comes down to speech, i.e. diction: the use of language, the variety of vocabulary; image, symbol, metaphor which carry the weight of beauty in poetry — one remembers the image the writer has used, and one is moved to memorise a beautiful phrasing.

But the beauty is also held by rhythmic devices. And here we come to the music of poetry, where the beauty of the line is not only in the eye, but in the ear. The master Eliot again puts it well: “The music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning.” It is well known that music and poetry have ancient common ancestors, and our more recent forays into performance poetry have tried to return poetry to its musical roots.

I like hearing poetry read aloud. Because it is there, in the spoken word, the sung word (again the heightened voice in poetry reading) that one often hears the beauty of the verse, which returns one to the written line on the page. I first began to enjoy Eliot and Larkin and Lowell and Kamau Brathwaite by hearing them read their work on old vinyl discs. Kamau, I was fortunate to hear read live in the seventies.(He can be heard and seen today on YouTube.)  The poet is essentially, as with the old minstrels and griots and Homers, a singer, a kaisonian, a reggae and blues artisan. And no song works without the beauty, the catchiness of the line’s rhythms, the chorus, which bring you, willing, dancing captive, to the truth discovered and revealed in some adulterous escapade, some pleasure, some political betrayal, some grief, some prophecy, some metaphysical conceit etc.

As a gloss on this, here is Eliot again. Speaking of Shakespeare, he says: “Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle — which alone constitutes life for a poet — to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” If the “something universal and impersonal” can be taken as a reference to the truth captured, I take the “something rich and strange” to refer to what I am describing as “beauty.” And no one doubts that Shakespeare, poet and dramatist, was the great writer of human truth-reality which continues to resound today and he did so in great beauty of lines, ‘rich and strange,’ that fill our memories still.

Beauty and its definitions can prove problematic and contentious. Does it reside only in the eye and ear of the beholder and listener?  Are definitions of beauty too culture-bound and so an absolute value of beauty is impossible? Or do the Truth and Harmony of art-shaping, well-placed together, create the Beauty of the art object – dance, painting, sculpture, song, poem?

And so to the third platform to accompany Truth and Beauty, that of Harmony.