WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry is the imaginative expression of strong feelings usually rhythmic. The spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.

Poetry is the art which uses words as both speech and song to reveal the relatives that the senses record, the feelings salute, the minds perceive and the shaping imagination orders it.

Poetry is variety in uniformity. Tailer says, ‘Prose is the words in their best order while poetry is the best words in the best order.’

It’s the act or art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.

Poetry is like a mini – skirt

Long enough to cover the subject.

Short enough to rouse the interest.

Poetry is a study of poems, which is a piece of writing, arranged in pattern of lines and or sounds, expressing some thought of feeling or human experience in an imaginative way of language.

From the dawn of time, man has made poetry and listened to it. It’s therefore as old as man. It is one of the most important things he can do, for it is through his poetic power that man advances and evolves within his world. D.H Lawrence puts it very well: “The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention and discovers a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flowers, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is ultimately chaos lit up by visions, or not lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm.’

The critic and poet, Archibald Macheish also says:

        The poet’s labour is to struggle with

        the meaninglessness and silence of

        the world until he can force it

        to mean: until he can make the

silence answer and the non – being

BE. It is labour which undertakes

to “know” the world not by exeg–esis

or demonstration of proof but

directly as man knows apple in the

mouth.

To know the apple you have to eat it. To know a poem you read it, hear it, allow it to come to life in your mind.

As the poet therefore struggles with Non–being to  force it to yield Being; knocking upon silence for an answering music, we the readers or reciters or critics listen and appreciate what they have discovered or brought to light from the ‘dark and silent world’.

Since poems are written by man and for man, they are very much like people. It’s very much like you having a thought of the people you know, especially your friends. How did you feel about them when you first met them? Sometimes, you did not like someone immediately; other people, you take long to get to know – may be, you don’t even like them much at the first meet, then gradually has you get to know them; you begin to appreciate qualities in them which you could not see when you first met. Sometimes, our best friends come from friendship which grows slowly.

Poetry is a bit like that. It’s about the way you feel. Sometimes a poem is immediately enjoyable. It makes you smile or laugh out aloud. Sometime, it reminds you of something you have experience; you think,

        “How true – that is exactly how I feel.

        But I did not think of putting it like that.”

At times, a poem may be hard to understand at first and even second reading, but after you have become so familiar with it, you can begin to understand.

Occasionally, poems like that become our favourites. So, you see, poems are like people you meet.