What is poetry?
A question from an ambitious student, paraphrased: What makes poetry poetry? In other words, what are the defining features of a poem that distinguish it from other forms of verbal or written communication?
The easiest answer, and probably the one you would find most often in any quick internet search of this question, is that poetry, unlike non-poetry, is written in verse form, rather than in ordinary prose sentences and paragraphs. This is an easy answer to be sure – but it is also a false answer. In fact, the earliest Greek philosophers, the pre-Socratics, wrote their ideas in verse, and yet very few people would call their writings poetry. The reason for this is not that their verses were bad poetry, but rather because there was something about their writing that clearly distinguished it from what was previously known as poetic language.
Verse, the formal structure of poetry, was the standard for serious, idea-based writing in the early centuries of the Greek language. This is natural, since (a) ancient Greek was a very musical language, and (b) poetry is every language group’s effort to combine the musical imitation of nature (song) with the communication of human experience and thought. Poetry, in other words, is music plus thought, or music plus reason. Poetic language, which uses rhythm and pitch as a method of communicating specific intellectual impressions and feelings, combines all the elements of the subjective human experience in a way that can reach us on various levels, from bodily impulse and common feeling to intuition and intellectual stimulation.
Notice, however, that in this description of what poetry communicates by means of melody, I referred to “intellectual impressions,” rather than definitions or arguments. That is to say, poetry does include the expression of ideas of a sort, but it does not express its ideas in a logical, deductive way, nor in a dialectical, inductive way. In other words, poetry is not proving, defining, or explaining anything. Rather, it is displaying or exhibiting something, namely the feelings, attitudes, or clarifying insights formed in the soul of the poet as he observes or reimagines some element of his experience from his current point of view. Ask the poet to explain or justify his point of view – in other words, ask him to show why his point of view is best, or why it is reasonable to see this aspect of life the way he is seeing it – and he will either not be able to answer your question at all, or else his answer will have to depart from poetic ways of thinking in order to develop a “proper” (though undoubtedly unsatisfactory) answer to your demand for an explanation or justification. That is to say, he will have to move from the realm of musical (emotional, moral) expression of a perspective into the realm of developing a logical argument for his point of view. The basic shift from a poetic to a philosophical way of thinking, either historically, such as in ancient Greece at the advent of philosophy, or personally, such as in the soul of a young person maturing from passion and enthusiasm to rational investigation, is the shift from expressing one’s subjective experience of life to attempting to express a (theoretically) knowable truth within or beyond one’s experience.
Here we can see the root of the historical conflict, defined in classical Athens, between philosophy and poetry. It is not simply “reason vs. feelings.” Philosophy also involves feelings in important ways. The conflict is related to the pre-logical, or pre-analytical, way of presenting one’s impressions that is essential to poetic language. This may be explained with the analogy of a young person full of natural passion and desire. Since he is not yet educated about the deepest questions and alternatives of life, he is necessarily ruled much more by his desires and passions than by knowledge and reason. Hence, he may be able, if he is particularly gifted, focused, and sensitive to his impressions, to produce exciting and beautiful words full of music and urgency, expressing the impressions he has formed from his life’s experience – charming words about his first love, his loneliness, his fears, or his life goals. But since the thoughts implied in his experience are mostly ideas that he has absorbed from the air around him without much reflection – meaning from his family life, his friends’ behavior, the popular attitudes of his society, the music that has affected him most in his youth, and so on – his words, although perhaps very lovely and even inspiring, are limited to the range of ideas and attitudes that he has absorbed relatively passively from his subjective experience. Hence, his poetic thoughts can become a trap for his soul precisely to the extent that they are powerful and fascinating. It’s a bit like the problem of activism, in which the person who becomes totally focused on the certainty and justice of his cause will become very closed-minded and unable to appreciate the other side of a question, or to see the weaknesses of his own position. The poetic soul is very different from the activist soul, but the dangers are analogous. The poet is trapped in his personal emotional perspective, much as the activist is trapped in his indoctrinated anger.
I used the example of a young, passionate person as an analogy for the poetic way of thinking, in order to explain the matter most simply. Of course, an actual mature poet – Homer, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats – is working on a much higher level of spiritual development, although it probably began much as I described in the case of the passionate young person experiencing love (for a person, for an idea, for his country, for the solitude of a silent forest) for the first time and immersed in self-forgetting enthusiasm for the object of his love. The mature poet, however, in addition to having the power to evoke universal feelings, is able to display his impressions of life, political community, and the world in a way that may be remarkably persuasive to listeners or readers, due to the combination of elevated vocabulary, advanced musicality, complex development, original imagery and metaphors, and the sheer attraction of grown-up, serious subject matter.
However, what the mature poet gives us is still “merely” impressions, formed from his experience, his emotional response to life, and the influence of the world around him. It can be exhilirating, crushing, inspirational, and thought-provoking – but it cannot justify its ideas or explain its definitions, because that is not what poetry does. For justifications and proper definitions, we need philosophy, i.e., scientific thinking in the deepest sense of the word “science.” This difference hints at the basic philosophical critique of poetry, or the nature of the rivalry between the philosophers and the poets, as presented so forcefully in Plato’s dialogues: The poet is persuasive and powerful in representing his view of the world, but he neither can, nor cares to, explain why his view of the world is true. By contrast, the philosopher, as a lover of wisdom, must ultimately reject and overcome any representation of reality, however attractive or passionate, if he finds that representation to be untrue. Truth is determined not by beauty or persuasive power, but by rational investigation by means of clear definitions and sound logic.
So both the poet and the philosopher, as we see in The Symposium, are driven by longing and passion, but whereas the poet will typically or essentially apply his desire to making beautiful representations of the vision he has acquired from his experience of the society around him, the philosopher essentially seeks to escape from the limitations of the views we inherit or imbibe from the social life around us. Hence, although the pre-Socratic philosophers employed the superficial structure of poetry – they wrote their ideas in verse – their manner of expression is logical and truth-focused, rather than emotional and beauty-focused. I think this distinction, seen right there at the very beginning of philosophical inquiry, and in a most obvious moment of transition and conflict between poetry and philosophy, helps us to understand, by way of comparison, what makes poetry poetry.
I have also chosen to enter into this complex issue by contrasting poetic writing with philosophic writing as a way of highlighting the differences between poetic and philosophic thinking. And in order to make the distinction as clear as possible, I began with the example of the pre-Socratic philosophers, because they wrote in verse, as poets do, and yet as we have seen this does not make them poets. In explaining this fact, I have emphasized that the physical form of poetry (verse of some sort) is not what essentially makes poetry poetry. From this, we may move a step further along in our quest for what, if not the formal structure, is the real heart of poetic writing and thinking.
As I have explained, though incompletely, the difference has to do with the way the subject matter (topic or theme) of the poem is handled, compared to the way it would be handled in a non-poetic context. Specifically, the poet is using elevated language, applied in a figurative and musical way, to represent some aspect of life – inner life or social life – with a kind of emotional clarity that allows the reader or listener to share or participate in the aspect of experience being represented. Usually, this is achieved through a concrete description of events or observations. By “concrete,” I do not mean literal; I mean particular, individual, in the manner of an object or event that is observable with the senses or through an act of direct imagining. In effect, the poet uses recognizable examples of life to indicate his impression, feeling, or thought about something. For instance, from Macbeth we get strong impressions about the moral dangers of ambition while watching the drama of an ambitious man and his wife. We feel the moral implications of the horrible events of their tragedy. From W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” we are given an unsettling impression of modern bureaucratic authoritarianism while reading the ironic representation of a spokesman for The State discussing the life of a recently deceased man who lived as The State expects a “good” person to do.
Such examples – and you could do something similar with almost anything worthy of being called poetry – help us see what poetry is for. (That final preposition would rankle the proponents of “art for art’s sake,” but so be it.) It doesn’t have to give a moral lesson, or even deal directly with morality at all, but the key point is that it deals with reality in a way that is partly focused on concrete experiences used to represent the poet’s ideas or his way of seeing things.
Here’s an example, once more from Auden, of a non-moral observation in poetic form:
To-day, two poems begged to be written: I had to refuse them.
Sorry, no longer, my dear! Sorry, my precious, not yet!1From “Shorts II,” in W. H. Auden, Epistle To A Godson and Other Poems, New York: Random House, 1972, 48.
Here, we are given a glimpse into the soul of the artist himself. He uses a simple example to represent something about the poetic mind, and the natural rhythm of creative activity. If we wanted to explain the idea in prose (non-poetic), we could say something like, “Sometimes an idea that had previously felt compelling comes to seem irrelevant or unnecessary in our minds after some time, while another idea might seem newly compelling and yet need more time to be worked out and developed before we are ready to express it for others.” That may be close to what Auden is trying to communicate, but he uses a concrete example and a musical voice to represent a thought process in the poet’s mind, so that we feel the playful struggle of ideas within him as they beg to be born, and he has to decide about them. This makes the experience more realistic, not abstract or theoretical, so the reader may feel what the poet feels, or share his experience.
On the other hand, here is an example of genuine verse that is recognizably not a poem, from Parmenides’ “Way of Truth”:
The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same;
for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered.
And there is not, and never shall be,
anything besides what is, since fate has chained it
so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but names
which mortals have given, believing them to be true –
coming into being and passing away, being and not being,
change of place and alteration of bright colour.2Parmenides, “The Way of Truth,” in Fragments of Parmenides, translated by John Burnet, 1920.
It is written in verse (the translation obscures the rhythm quite a lot), so it has the form of a poem. But look at the content of the ideas and images. Parmenides has a rational conclusion, reached through premises, and the primary purpose of the verse is to present the logical connection between the premises and the conclusion. It is an argument about the meaning of thought, and specifically the relation between thought and Being. The main point of the argument can be explained and judged on logical terms. We may think the writing enjoyable or impressive, and of course any vividness and clarity of writing is helpful in communicating difficult ideas. But the main issue we care about as we read this, and which the writer of such a verse wishes us to care about first and foremost, is this: “Is the argument true? Does the conclusion follow necessarily from the premises?”
Philosophy (or rational thought in general, of which philosophical thinking is the highest type) is a search for what is true – not true about this or that circumstance, but universally true, true by nature, true always and everywhere. Poetry, by contrast, gives us an imitation of some aspect of life as experienced in the mind of the poet. The imitation may be an accurate representation of reality or not, but that does not determine whether or not it is good poetry. Its effects are more subjective and emotional. Even its ideas are presented in a way that affects us emotionally; we are moved to “agree” with the poet’s representations because they feel so persuasive. And this, precisely, is the reason Plato has such a complicated and critical view of poetry and the social influence of the poets – even though he himself may in some ways be described as a brilliant poet.
Epilogue.– I have spoken of poetry from a philosophic point of view, which is to say I have theorized about divine inspiration and presented logical arguments about the Muses. I speak of poetry from the non-poetic perspective, while nevertheless hoping to do justice to what the poets provide that is different from what philosophic reasoning provides — and “different” not only as a euphemism for “inferior.”
Today, as we face prospects as bleak as any our fading modern civilization has ever faced, it ought to fall to the poets to provide a communally recognizable or galvanizing voice with which to say what we are all — or all of us still willing to think and feel as human beings in the full sense — needing to say, but unable to find the words to say. That is what a poet can do. Since we seem to lack any such voices today — and this itself is one way of measuring the uniquely dark aspect of our present crisis — the best we can do in this regard is hearken back to more intellectual and beautiful times, or rather to times when ideas were still the prime movers of life, and longing still the ultimate mechanism of motion.
Perhaps it is not merely appropriate to our purpose, but a little too eerily appropriate to our moment, that the example which comes to mind today, once again from Auden, is “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”3W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, London: Faber & Faber, 1966, 141-3 (Read the full poem here.) The poem’s year of composition, 1939, and the fact that the subject matter is specifically the death of an important poet, make it an especially fine emblem of everything a moment such as ours ought to bring forth, but no longer can. We no longer have anyone comparable to Yeats to lament in our moment of need, nor anyone comparable to Auden to help us mourn the loss while simultaneously moderating its effects.
For it was Yeats who, in 1938, during his final months of life, wrote the following.
Politics
“In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.” — Thomas Mann
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!4W. B. Yeats, “Politics,” in Collected Poems, London, Macmillan, 1965, 392-3.
Auden’s poem on Yeats’ death is written in three parts, in three different styles, the final section being a sublimely simple tribute to Yeats’ early form. In it Auden looked at where the world was in January 1939, and what Yeats’ departure at that disturbing moment represented. It is all too easy to map these sentiments onto our own moment, though with this poem’s abiding sense of wistful absence heightened to the point of agonizing emptiness.
In the first two parts of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden examines Yeats the man, focused on his death day and its meaning, with a certain detachment and severity which nevertheless places Yeats at the heart of a grand historical purpose, though one which, according to Auden, achieves its effects mainly in private hearts, rather than through the direct movement of anything practical. For, as he writes, addressing Yeats directly, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” and yet now, after the poet’s death, “Ireland has her madness and her weather still,” since “poetry makes nothing happen.”
In the lilting, fast-paced Part III, however, Auden resets the tone with a quick outline of the political scene:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
The poet immediately shifts to an outline of the private, human situation around him, in imagery all too apt today, detailing a universal condition of “intellectual disgrace” and men’s eyes, conceived as natural “seas of pity,” now frozen over.
There is no argument here, no logic, apart from the logic of general observation, and yet the images grab hold of one’s mind today as surely as they did the minds of the poem’s first readers in the months before the outbreak of WWII.
Then Auden bluntly states the poet’s mission in such a moment, as embodied in the work of Yeats, urging the poet on “to the bottom of the night,” where through his art his “unconstraining voice” may somehow “Still persuade us to rejoice.”
Appealing to common human perception and experience, the poet’s power, antecedent to all philosophical investigation, is in part his ability, in the midst of surrounding darkness — the darkness of fear, of hatred, of ignorance, of confusion — to bring some sort of unifying moral reality out of the growing nothingness: “With the farming of a verse / Make a vineyard of the curse.”
And in the final stanza, Auden summarizes his theme, encapsulating both the personal and universal:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Our own desert hearts no longer hold any promise of divining a fountain, and the prison of our days, far more fully engrossing than in 1939, obliterates any possibility of free men being found, let alone learning anything, and least of all how to praise. Each soul of today is sequestered in its own private hate, and there is no one among us today, or at least none who dares to speak aloud, with a voice that could make a vineyard of our curse, or persuade our locked and frozen souls to draw joy out of the very bottom of the night. Bereft of poets, our desert’s only remaining hope is philosophy, though she is also on her shakiest last legs, perhaps missing her ancient adversary and friend too much to feel much like talking.
