Remembering Poetry

Nobody any longer understands poetry. Including most people who consider themselves poets.

This has to be considered odd, since until recently—perhaps 150 years ago—poetry was the most popular literary form.

Since this is National Poetry Month, my friend Xerxes did a column celebrating the poem as a form.

But he seemed to struggle to define it.

He suggested, first, that poetry is about metaphor.

Much poetry uses metaphor, it is true. But so does good prose; the genre that depends most fully on metaphor is myth or legend. And some poetry does not. It is considered bad form to use an obvious metaphor in, for example, a haiku. Or in some modern forms: as aggressively asserted in Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

He next suggests that poetry is about the expression of emotion; quoting Wordsworth’s line that it is “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” The full quote is:

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” 

But that defines, not poetry, but Romantic writing. It would be equally true of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is clearly untrue, on the other hand, of most poetry: of the great epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales. Take only them, and emotional expression is a minority genre in terms of lines written. And this is not to mention Alexander Pope, or Robert W. Service, or Milton, or Rudyard Kipling, probably the four most popular and best-selling poets in the English language--or even the later Wordsworth.

Xerxes then posits—and this is his strongest point—that poetry seeks to say things “with an absolute minimum of words.” I have seen this said before; however, this defines not poetry, but modernist style. In modernist writing, it is equally true of prose: this is Strunk’s famous dictum, “omit needless words!”

None of these things are definitive of poetry: not economy of words, not metaphor, not vomiting up emotions on a page. What makes poetry a distinct form is its medium. And that medium is not the page.

Prose is the written word, preserved on a page.

Drama is the spoken word, seen live on a stage.

Poetry is the remembered word, kept always in the mind.

Poems really only work once memorized. This is exactly how and why a good poem will, in Xerxes’s own words, “dance a polka in your head.” It is experienced as uniquely alive.

This is the reason for rhythm and rhyme: they are mnemonic devices. They give you associations to help you memorize the poem. Contemporary poetry has been gravely crippled by their absence.

This is also the reason for much of poetic imagery; it is often useful as metaphor to convey some meaning, but whether or not it is metaphor, it creates visual associations, another mnemonic. Yeats sometimes made a point of writing poems connected only by images instead of rhyme. Lesser poets saw this, without seeing the art, and understood from this only that poems need not rhyme.

The current unpopularity of poetry, and the general inability to understand poetry, is directly due, I think, to a more general modern hostility to memorization.

Big mistake, for many reasons. That it killed poetry, the highest form of literature, is perhaps the least of it. We are all wandering aimlessly about with the bulk of our brains anesthetized.