Traditional Poetry

TRADITIONAL POETRY

Introduction

Poets and workshop conveners dread the question, but it can hardly be avoided. What exactly is poetry? Dictionaries generally offer something like: the expression or embodiment of beautiful or elevated thought, imagination or feeling in language adapted to stir the imagination and the emotions.

Speaking of high poetry, Maeterlinck said, 'the constituents are threefold: beauty of language, the passionate portrayal of what is real around and in us, nature and our own feelings, and the enveloping whole, creating its peculiar atmosphere, the idea that the poet forms to himself of the unknown, in which floats the being he invokes, the mystery which dominates and judges them, which presides over and assigns their destinies.'

That last deserves some brooding on, for all its Symbolist echoes, but it doesn't describe the aims of most poets working today, nor take us far in appreciating the sheer variety of past work.

Traditional Poetry

Traditionalists generally believe that poems give enduring and universal life to what was merely transitory and particular. Through them, the poet expresses his vision, real or imaginative, and he does so in forms that are intelligible and pleasurable to others, and likely to arouse emotions akin to his own. Poetry is language organized for aesthetic purposes. Whatever else it does, poetry must bear witness, must fulfill the cry: 'let not my heart forget what mine eyes have seen.' A poem is distinguished by the feeling that dictates it and that which it communicates, by the economy and resonance of its language, and by the imaginative power that integrates, intensifies and enhances experience. Poems bear some relationship to real life but are equally autonomous and independent entities that contain within themselves the reason why they are so and not otherwise. Unlike discourse, which proceeds by logical steps, poetry is intuited whole as a presentiment of thought and/or feeling. Workaday...