Apologia Poesia
(Or: why read poetry today, how it engages us, and how it is due for a revival)

During my first few weeks in university, a particularly unpleasant presence looming in front of the lecture hall digressed from the topic of Descartes, and said the following: “By a show of hands, who here actually reads poetry for pleasure?” I was distressed to notice that my hand was the only one raised.

The frightening, dramatic image that the event posed is, indeed, inaccurate. However, it begs to ask an ugly question. Why read poetry today? Why write it? What function, if any, does poetry have today? The twentieth century refreshed and revolutionised verse again and again. Boundaries were broken, and the very definitions of what is acceptable poetry were re-forged. But where is poetry today?

Modern poetry, TS Eliot argued, began with the Imagists around 1910. As Peter Jones notes, “imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our practice”(1) . But much more has also been introduced to such practice. Personal traumas were addressed with the emergence of poets such as Plath. The self was brought into poetry in a new way. Despite the protests from such fine poets as Larkin, I still find there to be beauty in “horror poetry”. But perhaps the new, confessional sense of self has begun damaging poetry in the twenty-first century, when our self-centred concerns often reduce to trivial dribble. Why read poetry, if the poem chooses to communicate to us about different types of coffee, dieting, or sets of spoons? Such verse is a step in the wrong direction from all the revitalising paths explored since 1910. For despite the various changes in poetry, the art always remained at its best when it sought for some sense of transcendence. Weight loss, despite its benefits for a healthier life, has little to do with transcendence.

Such sentiments can be mocked and called ‘elitist’, ‘pretentious’, ‘arrogant’, ‘snobbish’ even ‘highbrow’. They are not. Accessibility to the beauty of art is a privilege all should enjoy. However, I refuse to consider ‘accessibility’ to equal the numbing of that very beauty. In the contemporary society, we continuously move toward more and more ease and comfort. Society is arranged in a way that everything can be delivered and consumed with ease and at speed. We have speed-dating, online delivery services, ready-meal cooking. Poetry, requiring both time and effort from the reader, has suffered as a result of such a way of life.

The lecturer who asked this gloomy question from my course-mates and I was attempting to prove a point. His argument was that song lyrics are the modern equivalent of poetry. Indeed, they do function as such. People listen to their favourite songs, quote a lyric and deem it profound. This performed poetry is easy to access. We listen to it, and the accompanied music clarifies the mood to us. Before the even first word is spoken, the instruments inform us whether to feel angry, hurt, at peace or in love. However, if this is the form of modern poetry, I am afraid it has lost its search for transcendence. Though certain musicians produce poetic lyrics, much of music lacks in literary talent. Sexual innuendos and tales of dancing all night are far from profundity.

Poetry is akin to music; so much is true. However, the focus is on the music of the words. The music is in the rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and the inventions of wit. As a musical art, poetry is far closer to the classical compositions and jazz improvisation than the modern pop-song. In poetry, a theme is explored in depth, as with classical movements. The sound comes from considered arrangements. Just as a composer can read the notes of a symphony and hear the music, so can the reader of poetry pay attention to punctuation and the syntax of the lines and hear the way the poem ought to be read. Alternatively, as with jazz, poetry can be a movement along a certain theme, with sudden changes and chances for the improvisation based on a certain sound. Repeated rhymes in the middle of a largely free-verse poem are an example of this. In either case, the music present in the words of a poem is ill fit for a sequence of a verse, then a bridge, then a chorus. The repetitive pattern of a pop-song often fails provide time for the depth that the music of words requires.

It is possible that this explains why poetry is, currently, deemed as the dusty pass-time of mild-mannered academics poring over yellow pages whilst wearing faded tweed jackets. It is not accessible in the way that our habits would prefer. It is as highbrow and dull as classical music. Yet, very few pieces of music have made my spine tingle as the first part of Elgar’s Cello Suite, or filled me with as much exaltation as the overture of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’. Similarly, I can remember only a few times I have shivered as I did when I first read Yeats’ ‘Nineteenth Century and After’, or gasping out of simultaneous desperation, and spite as I did when I read Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’. Poetry is not only akin to classical music in the way that its exploration of a theme can be studied academically. It is also related to this form of music in the way it is made accessible for all: Not via over-simplified and dull ease, but via the power by which it engages us.

Poetry is the sound of words. It is also the paint of words, with which we can paint our visions. Through imagery, similes and metaphors, poetry not only gives us sounds, but pictures as well. Two of our sensory experiences are engaged simultaneously. Such stimulation is surely accessible, even if it requires a little commitment on the part of the reader. Thus, as an initial experience, poetry engages us as it reaches to our sense of sound, and our visual imagination. If we look at the experience a while longer, and contemplate the meaning of the experience, we realise that in its most beautiful form, the actual expression of the poem is profound. We are shaken and engaged by the meaning behind it. More so, from the profundity of the words, we can sense the incredible amount of emotion and passion that moves within the text. Again, as with the beautiful movements of the classical pieces, poetry is accessible through the way the text communicates an intense outburst of sheer feeling.

Why, if the poetic expression engages via touching us at our emotional core, does the poetry of dieting seem trivial? Surely one can still feel passion for such a concern. But, the emotion expressed in poetry is intense because it is emotion with meaning. In ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ William Butler Yeats writes:

A poet writes always of his personal life; in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria…Even when the poet seems most himself…he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. (2)

This ‘phantasmagoria’ that Yeats speaks of applies to poetry as a whole. The concerns of our life might be what inspire us, but in writing poetry, the topics transcend our own concerns. Troubles of love begin to ask questions on the nature of this complex emotion, and our fears and doubts are reflected as greater movements of the world. A personal belief in some beauty itself becomes a work of beauty. Through the expression of poetry, our concerns receive such consideration that they receive meaning, and completion. Thus, discussing weight loss as only weight loss and nothing but weight loss expresses nothing profound, because it is a fleeting concern we would express at a breakfast table. Seeking transcendence, the expression of poetry is great as it takes our personal concerns, and elevates them to romp “like the mind of God”(3) . This is why poetry is so accessible: it engages the very emotional core of our life. This is why it is much more than the trivial concerns of our lives: it gives the experience meaning and beauty.

Elisabeth Webb, although she is not published, is one of the living poets I have begun to admire the most. She once told me that life without poetry would be like walking through some dull, flat land. There might be many a thing to make our travels filled with excitement, but alas, there would be no soaring mountainsides, or deep vales. Our paths would remain the same tedious and trudging tromping of feet. I close my eyes, imagine the scene, and I agree. The weighty experience of reading or writing a poem makes our spirits soar. Like all art, it is unlikely to save the world. However, as with all art, the disappearance of poetry would be a step toward the world’s demise.

So we return to that smug man in front of the lecture hall, gazing at the two hundred hands that were not raised. What can poetry do to reach out for those hands and allow them to be engaged? Those hands are unlikely to reach for a book and be moved on their own accord. Perhaps here is another element where music may be of aid. Poetry is at its most engaging when read out loud, if only to oneself. Macbeth’s ‘”tomorrow, tomorrow” is stunning on page, but it finds whole new life when we hear it whispered on stage. The beat poets, Ginsberg in particular, were aware of the oratory power of poetry. Robert Frost was able to inspire his audience to cheers simply by reading the opening lines of ‘Birches’. Poetry is not only a written art, but also a performed and experienced art. The sight of Anne Sexton actually dancing to her poetry suffices for an example.

Public reading and performance of poetry does not interrupt the pure emotional expression of the words. Rather, it brings it to the audience. The poet, in performing the poem out loud, calls the audience to experience the music of the words and the images of the lines. Thus, poetry is also a sibling of theatre, as through the performance of poetry, a raw emotional bond is formed between the audience and the artist. Suddenly, everyone can see what is clearly on the page of every poem; the writing is not just ink on paper, but alive, organic and breathing. Poetry can find a revival for a new audience if it approaches them not only in print, but also in performance. This task is difficult, however. It requires not only for the poet to reach out and speak, but also for the audience to actually learn to listen and respond. But once this conversation exists, the art will be alive anew.

“If we shadows have offended”(4) . The paragraphs above assume no pretence of a pedagogue. They are but the result of some tinkering by a petty practitioner only at the very beginning of his road. It is an apologia addressed equally to the doubts in my mind as it is to your eyes. Still, it is an apologia of sincere belief. I still raise my hand at the question I was so insulted by a few years ago, and I continue walking in the landscape I desire. I assure you, my landscape is made of mountains.

By Juha Virtanen


Notes

(1) Jones, Peter. ‘Introduction’. Imagist Poetry. (Ed. Peter Jones). Penguin Books. London. 2001. 14
(2) Yeats, in Webb, Timothy. ‘Introduction’. Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats. (Ed. Timothy Webb). Penguin Books. 2000. xx
(3) Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Wordsworth Classics. Hertfordshire. 1993, 71
(4) Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Ed. R.A. Foakes). Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 2000. Act V, Sc i, line 401


Bibliography

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Wordsworth Classics. Hertfordshire. 1993
Jones, Peter. ‘Introduction’. Imagist Poetry. (Ed. Peter Jones). Penguin Books. London. 2001. 13- 43
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Ed. R.A. Foakes). Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 2000
Webb, Timothy. ‘Introduction’. Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats. (Ed. Timothy Webb). Penguin Books. 2000. p xiv- xli


Copyright September 2006