Excerpts: Functions of Poetry (or the poet)

For [Longinus]* poetry makes it possible for people to live more intensely, with a greater awareness of the life that confronts them.

__ Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters, 2008, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 7.

* Longinus was a critic whose treatsie "On the Sublime" was translated by W. Rhys Roberts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1899). Almost nothing else is known about him, according to Parini.

Power, says Rich*, is essential in the poet, in poetry itself; but this power "is not power of domination, but just access to sources." This means connecting readers to the history of language itself, to the history of human encounters with the violent realities that surround them, and to the history of human success in the struggle for spiritual survival."

Jay Parini, 2008, p. 22.

*Adrienne Rich, quoted from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978.

Excerpts: The Nature of poetry (and of poets)

Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.

___ George Oppen in Jay Parini, 2008, Why Poetry Matters, p. 22

"Poetry extends the boundaries of thought by extending the boundaries of expression itself. Poets articulate thoughts and feelings in ways that clarify both; they hold a mirror of sorts up to the mind if not to the world..."

___ Jay Parini, 2008, p. 8

"A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, ... by way of the poem itself ... all the way over to the reader."

___ Charles Olson, in R. Rogers, Metaphor: A psychonalytic view

The poet, says Sidney*, works through metaphors. Scientists, historians, and philosophers do this as well, whether or not they acknowledge it. Here Sydney gives poets the upper hand because they know what they are doing. They work in metaphors self-consciously, having learned how. Indeed, Sydney lifts the poet well above these others, who are tied to literal realities that they can only imitate badly and probably distort. The poet furnishes the world with fresh knowledge,..... creating figures on the page that become a substance themselves, interpreting reality as much as reflecting it. 

___ Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 10-11 

Compared with others, the poet is "endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness" (Wordsworth, 1800, Perface to Lyrical Ballads).

----

Coleridge held that "literary invention involves the natural, unplanned, and unconscious process by which things grow"*. Like a plant, the poet gathers material from the atmosphere around him and puts out branches and leaves. The poem itself, also like a plant, begins with a seed or "germ". 

___ Jay Parini, 2008, p. 14   

* Sir Philip Sydney wrote famously in defense of poetry in the "Apology for Poetry".

When a poet;s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary mind's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinzoa, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other...; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

T. S. Eliot in his essay on Metaphysical poets (in Selected Essays,1950), taken from Parini, 2008, p. 18.

[Poetry may be defined as] a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems .... to have something to do with self-preservation...

Also:

the pressure of reality is .... the determining factor in the artistic character of an .... individual. The resistance to this pressure or its evasion in the case of individuals of extraordinary imagination cancels the pressure so far as those individuals are concerned.

Wallace Stevens, 1951, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, taken from Parini, 2008, p. 20.

....the excellence of every art is in its intensity.

John Keats in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 35.

[All poems should be] short poems; it being impossible that a feeling so intense ... should sustain itself at its highest elevation for long.

John Stuart Mill, in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 35

The poem ... draws the senses to a fine point, to a pitch of expression. It involves a level of concentration rarely found in prose. Ideally, it returns us to our deepest concerns, our most intense and original feelings...

Jay Parini, 2008, p. 36

... poets do not really have ideas at all, they have perceptions, intuitions, emotional convictions.

Middleton Murry, in Rogers, Metaphor: a psychoanalytic view. p. 14

Colerdige [supposed artistic thought] to be dual in nature, combining a "streamy", associative, pictorial kind of thought with a more rigorous and rational type. Robert Rogers, Metaphor: A psychoanalytic view, p. 14.

Colerdige [thought that this other type] performs the adjunctive tasks of asserting control and giving direction to the other type [that is pictorial thought]. same as above.

[Poetry] must appeal to emotions with the charm of a direct impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only grope. And. "The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure relations."

Ernest Fenellose in R. Rogers' Metaphor: A psychoanalytic view, p. 35

[it] appears to be that poetic experience depends on a "difference of potential", a kind of discrepancy between two modes or moods of consciousness.

Owen Barfield in same as above.

According to Colerdige an ideal poet has the potential to bring "the whole soul of man in activity."

in Same as above.

The power of the poet to blend, or fuse, or synthesize disparate entities into some kind of unity reveals itself, says Coleridge, in "the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities", including "the idea with the image" and "a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order".

Rogers, 1978, p. 36

Excerpts: Poetry and Language

...poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through Adrienne Rich, Charles Wright, Mary Oliver, and Louise Gluck have thought about the nature of their art, expecially in terms of language as a kind of echo-chamber in which the origins of words (often lost over time) enhance their current denotations and connotations. Often unconsciously, the root meanings of words add resonance and meaning to the language of the poem.

__ Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters, 2008, Yale University Press, p. x

 

It had been recognized for centuries, by Galileo, for example, that the crucial aspect of language is discrete infinity---the capacity to create arbitrary structures of arbitrary complexity by putting together discrete items, which is rather unusual in the biological world.

Noam Chomsky, 2000 in Jay Parini, 2008. p. 30.

...there are only so many words; yet from these relatively few words one can create (as poets do) an endless variety of nuanced meanings.

Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 16-17.

Words are signs of natural facts.

Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

Nature is the symbol of spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Taken from Jay Parini, 2008, p. 36

Emerson plays with the notion that words themselves have buried within them a pictorial content, and that language tends to evolve in the direction of abstractness...... Poets consistently attempt to return words to their original sense. pictorial, concrete, and metaphorical associations.... to refresh lanugage by drawing words back into alignment with their original pictorial, concrete, and metaphorical associations....he rightly observes that the evolution of language from concrete to abstract has moral implications: "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language."  

Jay Parini, 2008, p. 37, 41

What I responded to [while reading poetry], on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning.

Louise Gluck, 1994, in Jay Parini, 2008, p. 40.

Excerpts: Poetry and spirituality

Spirit operates in nature, as Emerson suggested, and poetry could be iewed as a form of religious thought.... The language of poetry can ground us in spiritual and moral realities, offering the consolations of philosophy... For me, it is a continuation of the holy scriptures, the kind of language one studies for insights and inspiration, for spiritual direction, for correction. Poets write in the line of poetry..... without [poetry] we can live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities (emotional and intellectual) that life affords.

Jay Parini, in Why Poetry Matters, 2008, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. xiii-xiv

God imagines the world, and human beings and human beings---who were created in the image of God---replicate this process.

Ibid, p. 10

[According to Walt Whitman]*, anyone can appreciate the natural world, but the poet must do more than merely point to "the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects". All me and women see this luxuriance, he maintains. But the poet, above others, must "indicate the path between reality and their souls". It is in the articulation of spiritual lines between the human mind and the world of external reality that poets find their truest calling.

Jay Parini, 2008, pp. 16-17

* in Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

Excerpts: The political voice of the poet

         a lot of poetry has no overt consnection to anything that we might call political, but poets who willfully ignore the world around them risk marginality. Poets have to "read" the world, to respond to it viscerally, and to summon images of that world for readers. Poetry is not sloganeering, and poets.... rarely put forward direct solutions to problems. Instead, they offer a kind of understanding that is distinct, as well as useful, by creating a language adequate to the experience of their readers. In this sense, poetry matters because it can waken us to realities that fall into the realm of the political.

__ Jay Parini in Why Poetry Matters, 2008, p. xii