What is Poetry?

by Richard Lynn, Feb 22, 2009

What some of the greatest poets have written about poetry.

Robert Frost , an American icon and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry once said, "A poem is a performance in words".  Who can forget his performance in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with his haunting lyrics, "and miles to go before I sleep"?

"A poem should not mean...But be", said Archibald Macleish in his Ars Poetica or The Art Of Poetry.  He was born in Illinois, received three Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, graduated Harvard Law School and was the Librarian of Congress.

"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars", wrote Walt Whitman.  At the time, this transcendental-realist poet's work was very controversial.  After Lincoln's assassination, Whitman wrote, O CAPTAIN! My Captain!, ..."Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead."

Emily Dickinson was shy and introverted and spent most of her life living at home in Amhurst, Massachusetts.  Although she did study for seven years at Amherst Academy, she retreated back home to correspond only by letters until her death in 1886.  Her early poems, Nobody knows this little Rose and I'm nobody!  Who are you? express her forlorn feelings about life.  But, this major American poet also wrote  Hope, in which she declares, "Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul."

Oh, praise the sweet sonnets of Shakespeare (154 of them)  when he says in Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?...So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."  As king of the bards, he declared in As You Like It, "All the world's a stage. "  This playwright, poet and actor gave us poetry from Macbeth's witches such as: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair:  Hover through the fog and filthy air" and "Double, double toil and trouble".

"In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.", so said Marianne Moore of Bryn Mawr as she won her Pulitzer prize for Collected Poems, 1951.  With her critics voice, she  declared about poetry,   "I, too, dislike it.  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine."

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table;" is taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot, who defined metaphysical poetry at his lectures at Cambridge. 

"Gentlemen have power now and know it, But even the greatest and most famous kings Feared and with reason to offend the poets Whose songs are marble and whose marble sings." says Archibald Macleish from A Poet Speaks from the Visitors' Gallery.

I feel that poetry, like any art, is subjective, individualistic and personal.  It is a composition seeking to engage feelings and imagination with words creating sounds and rhythm.  As Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote in his poem Constantly Risking Absurdity, "the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a highwire of his own making".

So, for me, I chant from Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light".