Engl 20923, Intro to Creative Writing
Williams, Spring 2011

Poetry?

John Milton (1608-1674) compared poetry to philosophical discourse and found it “more simple, sensuous, and passionate.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1771-1834) said that poetry’s “proper and immediate object” was “the communication of immediate pleasure.” Coleridge also distinguished the differences between prose and poetry as “prose—words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order.”

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) stated: “Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things.”

Robert Frost (1874-1963) claimed that poetry “begins with delight and ends in wisdom.”

Horace (65-8 BC) declared that poetry instructs while it pleases.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and said that it “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

John Keats (1795-1821) stated: “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.”

The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms: Poetry, language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on a basis of sound as well as sense; this pattern is almost always a rhythm or meter, which may be supplemented by a rhyme or alliteration or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make poetry a more condensed medium than prose or everyday speech, often involving variations in syntax, the use of special words and phrases, and a more frequent and elaborate use of figures of speech (images, metaphors, similes). All cultures have their poetry, using it in various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of mediation. Poetry is valued for combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote: The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

President John Kennedy (1917-1963) declared: “When power leads a man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) stated: “Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) commented: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Louise Bogan (1897-1970) stated: It’s silly to suggest that the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. It doesn’t come to you on the wings of a dove. It’s something you work hard at.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) remarked: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

While explaining why he gave up boxing in college, T. S. Eliot also commented: “I was too slow a mover. It was much easier to be a poet.”

Eliot on his term, objective correlative: “An objective correlative is an object, an action, a situation which is never the ‘formula’ of that particular emotion and which, when presented to the reader, produces a sense of impression that elicits the emotion.”


Translations of a Japanese haiku:

The morning glory—
another thing
that will never be my friend.

The morning glory
is a separate being
and I can never know it intimately.

The morning glory
is yet another object
with which I will never become closely acquainted.

The morning glory—
something else
that won’t call me companion.

Which is better?