Writing and Reading Poetry #1 - Poetry - What's it all about?

Many people ask me what exactly poetry is, others say "well it all seems like a load of old tosh to me Ian, so what's it all about?" So I thought I would write a series of articles aimed at helping people who write poetry to feel confident enough to stretch themselves and try different styles and people who do not read poetry of who often find themselves bewildered by the content to get more out of their excursions into the world of verse.

These articles are not aimed at trying to teach anyone to write poetry, I could no more teach somebody to write poetry than plait fog. The Latin maxim Poetica nacitur, non fit (poets are born not made) still applies two thousand years later. So what is proper poetry?

Forget all traditionalist stuff about iambic pentameter and the modernist stuff about expressing feelings in a stream of consciousness, these articles are about Wild Adventures in Verse. "Poetry is emotions reflected at leisure," Lord Byron said; his contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says "if prose is words in their best order then poetry is the best words in their best order." But poetry is more than words and more than emotions, at its best it communicates on many levels.

The Roman poet Horace described poets as "the first instructors of mankind." Percy Bysshe Shelley used a few more words to say much the same:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! .

It's a tad more complex than "just write about your feelings then." I am often accused of being arrogant but I have never ever been so arrogant as to think my feelings are of any interest to anyone except me and those close to me. My observations, I hope, may have something to offer a wider audience.

The definition is important though because there are a lot of bogus and faux intellectual ideas being spread by people who would like poetry to become a branch of psychology in which writers lay bare their souls for the entertainment of amateur shrinks. One of these ideas, frequently repeated (and as often as not with tongue in cheek) is "there is no such thing as a bad poet, only a misunderstood poet." I have to say that is absolute bollocks! Poetry is a skill, and as with any skill there are good and bad practitioners (and you are welcome to decide for yourselves which category I fall into.) just as there are good and bad doctors, good and bad car mechanics, good and bad everything. But I am here as an objective commentator not as an arbiter of what is good and bad: I do not like everything that is good and not everything I do like is good.

More on what is good and bad later in the series though. In the end what matters is what we like. "I don't know much about (whatever) but I know what I like," is a phrase that should not be used in a derisory fashion. Is it better to know what we like or to follow the diktat of a self appointed intellectual elite?

It often seems to me, a published poet for over thirty years though I hesitate to say an established poet as I have always been an enemy of the literary establishment, that we have reached a stage at which there are more writers of new poetry than people who read it. New is the operative word here, millions of people are still reading Shakespeare, Milton, Bryant, Wordsworth, Holmes, Shelley, Longfellow, Poe, Tennyson, Frost and the many other great writers of the past. But few people are reading new poetry so why might that be?

There are many possible reasons. One, I think, lies in the way we are educated.

Until the second half of the twentieth century middle - class people in the English speaking world would have what was known as "the renaissance education." The philosophy of this system was to give a broad grounding of mathematics, language, science and the humanities.

The idea was that aged eleven to sixteen, young people have a lot of developing to do and do not really know who they want to be so the best education was one that would equip them intellectually and emotionally to grasp many different opportunities throughout life. It was not unusual for a scientist or mathematician to be a very accomplished poet or musician as well at a different stage in their life.

Part of this education involved being taught to "read creatively." We were taught the various tricks poets use to create atmosphere, manipulate emotions, communicate non verbally using rhythm, pace and tone. Also of course, we were taught the ancient myths of early civilisations, mostly Greek but stretching into Norse, Hindu, Celtic and Egyptian. This is important because the essential truths concealed in those myths still resonate deep in the human psyche.

Unfortunately modern mass education has abandoned the principle of education for life and simply prepares pupils as factory or office fodder for an insatiable economic monster. Who needs to know how to read poetry in order to hold down a job in a call centre or a supermarket?

But enough of this; you want me to show you some poetry and point out its strengths and weaknesses. So in part two we will look at an extract from Shakespeare, (start at the top I always say) but as the series progresses I will look at love poetry, war poetry, children's verse, sonnets, blank verse, rhyme, free verse and ways in which we make poetry communicate at a non verbal level.

Go to Part 2