Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Wordsworth's Criterion

Poetry Workshop by Pooja Nansi 3
Poetry Workshop (Photo credit: Steel Wool)
Okay, let’s talk poetry. I’m not interested in the fundamentals – form, structure, or metric fluidity, right now. I’m more at home with unwinding the spool of mystic which wounds around the craft like a shawl; the touch of poetry on the soul and the spontaneous ignition that accompanies the reaction.

I’ve heard people argue that the human emotion has no business meddling with the heartstrings of poetry. This school of thought points out that far too much research and constructing goes into the making of a poem. And so, they stress, to fling the craft at the mercy of a thousand nameless emotions is, stating it mildly . . .  flimsy. I disagree, though. Well, I’ll give them due fairness and add that these school does not deny entirely the relevance of our feelings to the flow of cadence. Actually, they view them as mere poetical attachés and nothing more. They assert that sensations are fickle and lacking in depth to be a route to the core of poetry.

Well, I don’t know about that one. What I do know is I’m out to understand the essence of poems and I’m taking into consideration the pick-and-choose nature of the craft. The selectiveness of verse, its choice of delicate words differentiates it from prose. I like explaining it to myself like this, if narrating in non-fiction is telling, if in story writing it’s showing, then in poetry above all, it is feeling.

Of course, I speak in defense of poetry; the emotion is an indispensable ingredient in every form of writing created to have a personal edge. Maybe, just maybe news reporting might be excused from what Stephen King calls Wordsworth’s Criterion.

The poet feels his way through each word applied to each line of verse, skillfully selecting, streamlining, and fine-tuning them to sync with the emotive flow of the entire tapestry. Poetic language is attentive to meaning, nuances, and sound patterns of words a poet repairs to in creating his art. This is something readily overlooked in any other form of literature, (Like I stated above, only writing that does not call attention to feelings maybe exempted.) except of course, music which at its finest is characterized by elements of poetics. By the way, writing which appeals to human emotion always always is the offshoot of poetics.

Aristotle said, ‘The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor’.  You would easily agree that without metaphors poetry would be one first class piece of dead meat. The metaphor is the evocative force of poetry which paints mental pictures of sweet delights within a reader.

Robert Frost was thinking the same thing when he remarked, ‘There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor . . .’ Poetry is the vehicle of emotion just the same way the emotion is the writer, the driver of poetics.

Robert Wallace puts a ring of finality to it when he says, ‘The metaphors virtually stand for or present the emotion.’  Remember, William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry; Emotion recollected in tranquility?

The metaphors are visible passions which lend their charm to the poem. In other words, they ain’t just the thrust of feelings in the verse but the seen aspect of emotions recollected.

Keep your pen bleeding!


Akpan


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