The Point of Poetry
I. What is the Point of Poetry?
That poetry has persisted across virtually all human civilizations might compel us to wonder why. It stands with a handful of other ubiquitous art forms: painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Like these, poetry seems to exist because humans do. Then again, poetry is not architecture or painting, etc. So what about this art form has enabled it to continue as a unique conduit of human expression over the millennia?
Poetry must be more than mere expression, however, since, like all art, it implies some audience. Speaking broadly, wherever poetry has been written, it has also been read or listened to or, in the case of the theater, observed. It stands to reason (hypothetically) that if we stopped reading poetry, it would serve a rather different point for Mankind, if any. Therefore, when asking the question "what is the point of poetry?" we are really asking two related questions: why do people write poetry? And, why do people read poetry? In this post I want to get at those questions by exploring the notion of poetry as sight.
Understanding the point of poetry as a kind of sight—sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal—helps us make sense of its perennial presence in human civilization, both as an artistic expression and experience. I also hope it encourages you to enjoy more poetry, more.
II. How Poets Define Poetry
Before going any further, let's overview several alternative definitions of poetry from within the Western tradition.
William Wordsworth: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poetry is indeed something divine... Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination.’"
Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Robert Frost: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Salvatore Quasimodo: “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”
Poets even tend to get poetical when describing what they do! As a consequence, we are left with almost as many definitions of poetry as we have poets. And yet I selected these particular definitions because they share a theme: poetry is tethered to the emotions. A banal observation, perhaps, since poetry is popularly conceived in just this way, as the expression of intense feelings or sentiments—love, remorse, joy. We may even expect to hear poetry at those pivotal, and thus emotional, events in life, like weddings, funerals, birthdays, graduations, and so on.
Yet we should notice that none of the above poets mentioned rhythm, meter, line breaks, or any other of poetry's formal elements as essential. Form plays its part in the construction of poetry, of course, but anyone can learn how to write an ABAB rhyme scheme. No, the essence of poetry—and the mark of a true poet—is not form, but spirit. Wordsworth doubtless wrote his share of iambic pentameter, but that was not evidently what made his poems sing as poetry. Instead? Poetry is "...the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Or as his contemporary Percy Shelley put it, "something divine."
If the point of writing poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, then the point of reading poetry must be what Dickinson claimed, to "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off." We might wonder just what she meant by this, but the gist is clear enough—we read poetry to feel. The great Irish poet Michael O'siadhail recently corroborated this sentiment by suggesting that we know a piece of writing as poetry because it moves us—not literally, of course, but internally, spiritually, emotionally.
But is that all? Or can poetry serve any other end than to express/evoke emotion? At this point I'd like to contrast the idea of poetry as “emotions that have found words” (Frost's definition above) with my initial proposition: poetry as sight.
III. Seeing & Feeling
We can begin by noting two potential dangers with the notion of poetry-as-spontaneous-emotions. First, by so highlighting individual emotions—whether the writer's or the reader's—poetry can fall prey to a kind of subjectivism, where feelings take precedence over the text. In the worst case, we risk instrumentalizing poetry; it becomes a brute tool for achieving some subjective feeling. Subjectivism silos writers and readers in their emotions. And because emotions ebb and flow like waves, the poem can get lost at sea, even to its author.
Second, when readers and writers of poetry become isolated by their emotions, the connection between poet and audience is enervated. Poets write to express emotions but not, it seems, to communicate with anyone in particular. This reinforces the idea that readers are only to seek some feeling when reading, even if that feeling has little to do with why the author penned the poem in the first place.
But what if poetry is not so much trying to feel as attempting to see? To see literally—a beam of evening light falling on a dusty baseball; or to see metaphorically—a baseball as the essence of adolescence. Why else, after all, do poets depend on analogy as they do? Analogy offers a new lens through which to see reality. By comparing two carefully-selected objects or concepts, we come to see both in a new light. Yes, light! Now that's the language of seeing, and all poetry, it seems to me, is striving after this—a new apprehension.
Take Billy Collins' poignant poem "Divorce" for example:
Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks
across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.
Here Collins offers insight—or "in-sight"—into the tragic reality of divorce. He lets us behold something new, or see something old from a new standpoint. As it happens, Collins went through divorce himself, so I suspect the poem overflowed from a number of deep emotions. But the metaphor does more than evoke feeling; it illuminates. And it resonates because it illuminates a common facet of human experience clearly and creatively. The poem does prompt feelings, but they are feelings prompted by perception, what Christian Wiman calls “fugitive instances of apprehension.”
Even bad poems, bad metaphors, and poems without metaphors strive to see by describing reality like this. I may employ a bland simile: she was beautiful like the grass. But it falls flat because grass is not evidently or always beautiful. Still, I am attempting to see. (Now is a good time to note that even when writers turn to poetry to convey what they have already seen, the process of writing—contingent as it is upon language, context, and the poet's own relative competence—is always simultaneously an act of coming-to-see, an attempt. Like the painter, the poet sees through the creative process.)
IV. Disclosing Reality
When we understand poetry as the attempt to see one of reality's infinite layers, we begin to distance ourselves from subjectivism and find footing on something firmer than individual emotions: shared human experience in a shared world, shared language, shared reality. In Shakespeare's 116th sonnet we read:
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come
Time wielding a sickle in the face of Love—why does that grip us? Because it conveys something profound about our shared Human Experience; it's an image of the essence of time. And notice: when we strive to "see" what Shakespeare saw (of which we cannot be completely sure) we strengthen, rather than weaken, the relationship between writer and reader. Writing poetry is an attempt to see, and to help others see; reading poetry is an attempt to see through the eyes of the poet. When we see, we may feel deeply indeed. This is why feeling and seeing are not finally at odds, but augment one another. Sometimes we must feel our way toward seeing, and other times we must see our way toward feeling.
Either way, a great poem “adds to the stock of available reality,” as R. P. Blackmur put it.
T. S. Eliot once remarked that a poem’s meaning lies somewhere between the poem and the reader. As readers, we cannot help but bring our unique backgrounds and biases to the text. Must we conclude, then, that every writer and every reader is an island, isolated within the confines of his emotions and interpretations? Far from it. Recall Salvatore Quasimodo's definition of poetry above: “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” The same could be said of sight, something we can share. Our greatest poets disclose that which was formerly obscure or latent about our lives, about Life, by adding to the stock of available reality. In the end, the point of poetry is just that: to point—to notice, to see, and finally, to wonder.