What is Poetry

There might not be much new in this that hasn't been co-opted by me before but the opportunity arises again from behind-the-scenes discussions and another of my several truisms is that poets repeat themselves more after the age of 60, so I'm allowed to.

Reduced to about 1500 words, it just about fits in here. I'd like to find a better title for it and will return to amend that if and when I do. The definition might be underwhelming to those who think 'poetry' is surely more than that but not all defintions are as good as the one I once found of 'kangaroo' that said it was an antipodean marsupial that proceeded in a series of flying bounds. 

I am increasingly persuaded by the implicit suggestion that poetry might be beyond us or a figment of our imagination by the aside in Sean O'Brien's novel, 'Afterlife', in which the tragic superstar poet of her generation, Jane Jarmain, is said to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible' which I'm glad to be able to recycle again now.

So, to complete my full repertoire of poetry catchphrases, which is also lifted from elsewhere - All you have to be is any good.

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My first meeting with the local poetry group here was in 1982. I’ve been a casual member with varying levels of attendance or excuses not to ever since. I’d seen it listed on their programme and the subject, What is Poetry?, was very much the sort of subject I’d have enjoyed at university where I’d finished the year before, the Aesthetics course with Colin Lyas having been a favourite.

The discussion was well-intentioned with dictionary definitions about ‘craft’, the idea of it being a ‘heightened form of language’, use of metaphor, alliteration and rhyme until eventually someone read some Byron and compared it with some T.S. Eliot, the implication being that Byron was poetry and Eliot wasn’t. I sat quietly and listened, not wanting to sound either too clever or say anything too opinionated among people I didn’t know, but, when the opportunity arose at the end, as a sort of summing up, I observed that much of what had been said related to the difference between good poetry and bad rather than what was poetry and what was not. 

It’s not a pejorative term that confers approval. Poetry can be bad as well as good and much of it is. Poetry can’t be assumed to be innately a good thing. 

At the time my own definition might have been that a poem was a ‘verbal construct’, which it usually is, but so is anything else made of words and so it doesn’t serve the function of delineating poetry from other writing. 

I can’t now remember how many of the pronouncements on the subject made by famous poets were quoted, if any.

Aristotle is a good place to start, whose digressions are a bit long for inclusion in a dictionary, 

Aristotle 

Certainly, poetry doesn’t have to deal with actual things but it can if it wants to. Had he known about photography, he might have compared it with painting and said that poetry is like painting in that it imbues its subject with something of the artist’s feelings about it.

In no particular order, Wordsworth’s verdict was that, 

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

Shelley considered poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’; Coleridge has, ‘Poetry; the best words in the best order’, Auden offers ‘memorable speech’, Carl Sandburg says, 

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. 

Which is more like a poem than a definition of one.

I’m glad I’m checking these as I go because I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that it was Ezra Pound that said ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, which is one of the more useful contributions, but it was Robert Frost. Pound’s ‘poetry is news that stays news’ isn’t quite so good.

Most of these are manifestos, agendas or aspirations, promoting each poet’s methods or sympathies rather than a definition that could be used to decide if any given specimen was poetry or not. A definition of a house will ensure we don’t confuse that which is a house with an apartment, an office block or a kangaroo. Poetry, or ‘a poem’, needs to be defined equally accurately.

Since many of those definitions were attempted, poetry and many other things have been through Modernism and the Avant Garde which the likes of Aristotle, in all fairness to him, couldn’t have been expected to foresee. One thing we have to be able to contain is the inevitability of the ever-readiness of an endless supply of self-styled mavericks to overturn whatever definition is put in place just because they can. Concrete poetry consisted of sound sometimes rather than words, like the Konkrete Kantikle that includes ‘number poems’ that is so rare that when I google it I’m referred back to my own website and every few months I still search the archives upstairs hoping to find the late 70’s magazine that had Michael Daugherty’s concrete poems that consisted entirely of punctuation.

It’s not going to be me that says any such thing isn’t poetry. I wasn’t quite 10 when Marcel Duchamp died but I was 32 when John Cage did. The likes of them, and Yoko Ono, were significant contributors to our perceptions of what was what in my formative years and so it’s not for me to say, as I heard said in meetings many years later, that poetry should rhyme. 

Homer doesn’t; Ovid doesn’t. They concern themselves much more with scansion, that poets blinder than Homer might have subsequently abandoned at their peril.

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘poetry is the music of being human’ sounded a bit like what those dreamy Romantic giants of two hundred years previous had said and can’t be made to mean very much at all. Poetry would be something of a luxury for millions and being human doesn’t sound like that to them in the same way that it does to Poet Laureates and Professors of Creative Writing.

We have to allow poetry to be all and everything it wants to be or thinks it is and then dismiss it as bad poetry if need be. 

In one Philosophy seminar at university, 40 years ago now, Colin Lyas asked on what grounds we could believe what he was telling us and I suggested that he was a lecturer and we were students and so we should be able to believe him. This ‘argument from authority’, or argumentum ad verecundiam, was readily accepted, possibly because it was in the Philosophy Dept of a lowly-rated university (then) as part of a liberal humanities education that meant well but the argumentum ad verecundiam is clearly a fallacy post-Trump, during Boris Johnson and long after even worse travesties. But, at my own risk, I will use as a potentially treacherous stepping stone, a definition of poetry given by Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Literary Theory, who rose from the backstreets of Salford to become Professor at both Oxford and Cambridge before taking an Emeritus job at Lancaster.

In his book, How to Read a Poem, Prof. Eagleton, who has had a long time to arrive at his preferred form of words, delivers,

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

It’s at the start of Chapter 2, here,

Eagleton, How to Read a Poem 

But in the same way that Aristotle didn’t need to make the point that poetry doesn’t have to be true, neither should Prof. Eagleton assert that it is ‘fictional’. It doesn’t seem right for me to be telling them they’re both wrong but it is ostensibly the fact that some poems are entirely true. And so we need to delete ‘fictional’ from the quotation above.

While it is surely desirable for a poem to be ‘verbally inventive’, not all of them are. Many are cliché-ridden and steadfastly refuse to do anything original. I wouldn’t want to name any names but I could find any number of poems, or even poets, in magazines that have never done anything verbally inventive even if they thought they had. They are bad poems but that doesn’t mean they’re not poems. So we can’t allow that. 

And why would a poem need to be ‘moral’ to qualify as a poem. It must be possible for a poem to be immoral. I have the Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, within arm’s reach here. It might be a matter of opinion but many ethical traditions would struggle to accept them as ‘moral’. 

I’m going to have to accept that a poem is a ‘statement’ in order to retain any sense in the sentence but, yes, it is stated and so it’s a statement. Donald Davie distinguished between poems as ‘considered utterance’ or ‘unconsidered utterance’ and only now does it occur to me to ask whether he meant it was the poet or the reader that did the considering but surely it is ‘considered’ by the author who has considered various options - one might hope - before deciding on their form of words and it is considered by any reader in the act of reading. It can become disarmingly straightforward to break down some of these questions. 

What we are left with, having removed the extraneous bits is,

A poem is a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

And, thus, poetry is the language used in writing such a thing.   

There is still the ‘prose poem’, which is a thing whether it’s a tautology or not. The idea of what was ‘poetry’ or ‘a poem’ had taken off in all sorts of directions long before the prose poem came about which might have been in France in the C19th. All the ‘prose poem’ does is abnegate its claim to being a poem by admitting that it’s prose. It’s a very French, or possibly Belgian, idea like René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. That is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. A prose poem is not a poem because it’s prose. But it’s also a poem because it says it is.