|
Source: (consider it)
|
Thread: So, what *is* poetry after all?
|
LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
|
Posted
What is poetry? We use words all the time. Why do we suddenly get happy, excited, upset ... if we put them in a certain order? Is it the story they tell? The rhyme? The rhythm? But there are good poems where at least one of these elements are missing.
Why do we want to listen to them?
--------------------
I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
|
|
RuthW
liberal "peace first" hankie squeezer
# 13
|
Posted
Not exactly an answer to the question "what is poetry," but related: In college I took courses in modern poetry and the modern novel at the same time from the same professor. One day in the poetry class, the prof said that he had noticed that folks in the modern novel class always got kind of depressed about the whole thing, but that that never happened in the poetry class. (I had by that point lost interest in the novel class but loved the poetry class.) He asked if we had any idea why, given that there were plenty of the same depressing themes in the poetry as in the novels. The upshot of our discussion was that the order implied in poetry, even in the free verse, somehow made it all okay -- the organizing principles were clearly visible in the poetry in a way that they weren't in the novels, and the very fact of organization made it all seem bearable.
As for the why questions -- because it's art?
Posts: 24453 | From: La La Land | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
|
Posted
I think what Pope says of Wit -
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind:
applies to poetry. It articulates better than we can what we all feel, and does so in away that is shapely, satisfying and memorable. It combines beauty and truth.
Not all poetry, all the time, of course. But when it works.
The other thing I find extraordinary about it is the way it transcends time. You read a thing written five hundred, a thousand, two thousand years ago in an unimaginably different world, and it's as if a voice spoke in the room with you, abolishing all that distance.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view
