Understanding poetry

Perhaps the oldest kind of literature known to humanity, poetry in its earliest stages was told or sung, but during its long and continuing evolution it has become part of the written tradition and has been used for several purposes. Poetry springs from that time when humankind "discovered in fear and rapture the throbbing newness of the world. Poets have always known. All the legends of antiquity attest to it," writes Aime Cesaire.

Foremost among the many uses of poetry has been its ability as lyric, narrative, and epic to pay homage to the gods and to recount the history of specific groups of people. The Egyptian "utterances," pyramid texts, and demotic literatures; the Indian vedas; the Greek epics; the Norse sagas; sections of the Old Testament; the Japanese "Record of Ancient Things;" Kojiki (which derives from the more ancient Chinese writings); and the Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya, the Popol Vuh —these are but a few examples of group history. We easily recognize form, rhythm, imagery, and compression in the writings of the cultures of these peoples.

Americans, however, like Europeans, have been most influenced by Greek culture, in which the writers were known as poets, a title that carried both responsibility and praise. Greek literature consisted in large measure of plays that were written in poetry, a convention of the time. Aristotle's Poetics, therefore, touches on both playwrighting and poetry. Roman poets adopted most of the rules of the Greeks, but these fell into decline, later to be revived during the Renaissance. Beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), poetry in England flowered and spread throughout the English-speaking world and far beyond, though English was in turn influenced by a host of other languages. These enriched the English language and helped to establish new and enlarge old themes that were not merely English, but universal. Today the language is so wealthy that poets continually explore it for new or different ways to express themselves. Rita Dove, poet laureate of the United States, writes, "Poetry, for me, must explore the felicities of language," as she combines "historical occurrences [like the one in 'Parsley'] with the epiphanal quality of the lyric poem."

During the evolution of poetry there has been the enduring discussion about what it is. Strabo (58 B.C.—24 A.D.), along with many before and after him, believed poetry was a mask for historical and scientific truths. Emily Dickinson's quatrain, written about two thousand years later, alludes to the same thing:

To clothe the fiery thought

In simple words succeeds,

For still the craft of genius is

To mask a king in weeds.

The major role of poetry, however, according to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others of their time, was to stand in opposition to science. "Poetry," Coleridge wrote, "is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter." Leigh Hunt (1784—1859), an influential figure of the Romantic period, declared, "Poetry begins where matter of fact or science ceases...." Cesaire in our own time says that science "is a lion without antelope and without zebras... It is gnawed by hunger, the hunger of feeling, the hunger of life." And Omar Salinas in "Quetzacoa-tle" takes the impersonal "Big Bang" scientific theory of the origin of the universe and turns it into an exciting, vivid image:

You lunged and caught fire

flowers falling from a disenchanted

sky

The Korean poet So Chongju (1915—) also joins the opposition against science with this statement: "What must cause the poet to worry is not the anxiety drawn out of that which cannot be completed, but the anxiety and longing instilled by that which is completed too readily." Science fixes rules, insists on the veracity of its computations beyond which the poet must always travel.

The question of what poetry is or does remains open, and perhaps that is the wisest way to perceive poetry: as not being static. While we presume that poetry and prose differ, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and Ezra Pound agree that it would be a "fruitless and futile mania" to probe for those differences.

Nevertheless, commonly accepted as differences between poetry and prose is that poetry may be written in meter, thus creating rhythm, and prose is not; that poetry may use rhyme (though it is not required to), while prose does not. Poetry distills, compresses, and refines knowledge from bulk to universal essences through rigorous and selective use of language. Prose, in contrast, is not necessarily concerned with those processes. Prose has long been considered "ordinary" language, even though the best prose may contain quite extraordinary language. It is worth noting that a number of poets also write prose fiction, like Alice Walker, Shirley Lim, Alexander Pushkin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Rita Dove, Ishmael Reed, Margaret At-wood, Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Al Young, and others. This suggests that the differences between the genres may be in the eye of the beholder.

The poet may be like Houdini, binding himself or herself in the chains of traditional poetic forms and then creating interaction between theme, tone, imagery, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, rhythm, meter, sound, and structure. Then the poet is tossed into the sea of creativity. The poet is further expected to miraculously escape, that escape being a poetic rendering of universal truth, vision, or beauty. When all is said and done, poetry should surprise us as much as Houdini's escapes surprised and delighted his audiences.

Some poetry may appear to be difficult to read (and some of it really is). But, like other forms of literature, it should be placed in perspective We should know, for example, when the poem was written, because that helps to tell us what kind of tradition it has inherited. Maybe the title of a poem will supply the clues we need to understand its theme, like W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," or Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Bean Eaters." We should not try to bring more to a poem than is really there; if we anticipate, we cannot be surprised or delighted. Above all, the reader should have confidence in his or her ability to both understand and enjoy poetry, whatever its form. The more traditional structures, such as the sonnet or the villanelle, were the result of convention or poetic challenge; poetry is always changing, but every poem challenges the reader to get inside it.

Nothing about a poem is as important as the way it makes us feel—usually, the way the poet wants us to feel—and this is a reminder that it is imagination or invention and not profound meaning that is the most important gift the poet can bring us, for the poet always and ultimately wants us to understand the poem. Gwendolyn Brooks says quite pointedly, "I don't want [my work] to misrepresent the way I look at life to my readers."

Like Houdini, who kept seeking new ways to escape new inventions for detention, poetry evolved from the confinement of rigid structures and sometimes content, to what we now call free verse. This kind of poetry was fired by a new kind of poet, epitomized by Walt Whitman, in a relatively new nation. This was a poetry freed from the old rules. It introduced cadence, a sometimes stuttering kind of rhythm, and relied heavily on imagery. Free verse imagined the ordinary to be universal.

The new forms that were to spark the imagination, however, were not by any means acceptable to all poets. In this collection, for example, a number of twentieth century poets are as comfortable with the sonnet as were the poets of sixteenth century England. Auden, who remained a disciple of traditional structures, wrote of such devices as rhyme, meter, and stanza, that they "are like servants. If the master poet is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly, happy household." Still, form changes to reflect contemporary sensibilities. Thus, we include among poets the legions of blues, folk, rock, and others who sing story-poems which, in the poetic tradition, are also reduced to shimmering, universal essences.

In the sections that follow, we examine the strategies employed by poets to frame their visions of human experience in verse. Brief essays introduce key elements of poetic technique: theme, diction, tone, imagery, symbolism, simile and metaphor, personification and apostrophe, meter, rhythm and sound, structure, and form. Within each chapter, the work of several poets appears, followed by questions for comprehension and writing. By carefully reading and discussing the selections in each chapter, we might come to agree with Gwendolyn Brooks' assessment that poetry is, in the final analysis, "life distilled."

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