On Poetry

If the aim of the poet is, as Matthew Arnold suggested, to be a critic of life, then in our current age, it has become so much less a criticism of the aggregate or common life and so much more a criticism of the individual life. I don’t purport to offer a definition of poetry—so many that have come before have worked so hard to provide just that: Arnold, Wordsworth, Dryden, Aristotle, and many more so countless that it would require an anthology to do the subject justice. But let me address myself to the perception of poetry in current culture and to the definition of “poet.”

So few now practice the craft of poetry that lay claim to the name of poet, or at least to the station of creator of poetry. There can be no doubt that poetry is a craft, though there are so many varieties of poetry as to obscure any easy definition of it. Is it simply the lack of straight prose formation? Many would certainly argue this as an adequate definition. Certainly, blank verse has become an accepted format within the sphere of art we call poetry. Unfortunately, it too often seems that blank verse has become the standard of what we now call poetry, much to the deficit of the legacy and the potential of poetry.

Much like with visual art, the modern and postmodern movements in reaction against what came before have paved the road to the current belief that whatever one person calls art must be accepted as such. In other words, if one person claims her work is poetry, we accept it to be poetry. Is it? Maybe. But certainly we can only accept this manner of definition if we accept the view that the individual subjective interpretation of art is as valid as any other interpretation, contradictory though it may be.

Might there not be another standard by which we may judge art, and in this case poetry? Shouldn’t poetry be judged to be such by a more communal standard? If we accept that individual determination that poetry is poetry because one person says so, then isn’t poetry as a communal and communicative activity essentially dead? One person might say that she has written a poem, but if the poem does not inspire or affect or at the very least communicate, then surely it cannot be considered to be a poem. Poetry, as all art, must do something to the receiver! There must be something that expresses some universal aspect of the human experience and offers some contact with those protean emotions in our selves. While one person’s poetry may offer that sense to that person, if it does not offer up a similarly potent experience to even a small segment of the great mass of the human community, it surely cannot be called poetry.

I have no doubt that the individual need to create must not be denied, and should the individual require that her efforts be called poetry to satisfy her need to express and be expressed, then so be it! However, isn’t that what a journal or diary is for? So much poetry today is expressed with the quality befitting a diary more than an anthology. And our ever increasing need to be heard crying out in the crowd leads us to ever expanding definitions of poetry. In this age where anyone can publish her “poetry” to the Internet, ostensibly offering her words to the world, the definition, nay the art, of poetry suffers.

I don’t suggest that the individual should not have recourse to submit her writings to anyone and everyone who would listen, but rather that we should be careful when we offer so freely to accept that it is poetry. We cannot deny that the definition of poetry is more slippery than ever. Nor can we deny that the need to express oneself will only get stronger as ever more voices enter the human colloquy. What we must do is seek more intensely than ever to offer a workable definition of poetry so that the art will not be lost to future generations. We must seek to define what makes poetry, what makes it bad and what makes it good, and what step we have taken in the evolution of poetry so that we may better understand to what we are precursor.

Arnold suggested that not all ages provide the necessary elements to the birth of great and lasting poetry. He blasted Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats for lacking the total sensibility to create poetry that would stand the test of those that had come before: Shakespeare and Milton. He tempered this with the belief, of course, that Wordsworth would one day be recognized to take his place as third behind Shakespeare and Milton. So might we not be in such an era? Is it possible that we are living in a time that simply will not produce the next Milton, the next Shakespeare, but only produce the next Wordsworth? I sometimes feel so when I look to the so called poets that grace every Tom, Dick and Harry’s website. And yet, I cannot help but think there is hope for us to produce poetry that will one day be set beside those greats that have come before. We live in a time of communication the likes of which have never before been seen, and surely we will not be able to judge until we take the next step in our communication evolution.

In the end, we must accept that we are but one stage in a continuum of the creative arts, and while we must judge our contemporary art by our understanding of our contemporary culture, we must not forget that successive ages will judge us by their standards and by our own! Will future generations judge us to be so arrogant as to believe that every word written by every man, woman and child was poetry because we said so? I can only hope that those that come after us will recognize that a few of us at least understood that awareness of how our current age was different, and in what ways, from those that preceded is essential to our understanding of why poetry is what it is today. Not only that, but that our descendants will recognize that the only effective rebellion is one in which the knowledge of what came before is the reason for rebellion.

Our desperate need to be heard screaming amongst the millions has blinded us to the realization that our voice is loudest when we are eloquent. We the “poets” don’t know what came before, or why blank verse became. We only feel that our words should attain the status of art and be heard by one and all. And we forget the greatest artist is one who knows her craft; the greatest poet is she who breaks the meter for a purpose. If the individual is to be the voice heard amongst the din, she must understand the music of the masses and the sounds that have come before. The most powerful note in the symphony is not the note misplayed, but the note intentionally discordant.

Micah Krabill
March 26, 2004