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

A broader reflection of pain...?

آرائش خیال بھی ہو دل کشا بھی ہو

وہ درد اب کہاں جسے جی چاہتا بھی ہو

Ornament to my thought... Unraveling to my soul...

I have lost the ache to which my heart aspires

In my last notes on Nasir's sorrow I focused on the transcendental quality of the experience of pain. This verse also refers to the same experience but is different in certain ways.

Most notably, it lacks the piercing tone of the last verse and the intense emotionality of the personal experience depicted over there. While flowing, the verse also reads more measured, compared with my last subject. The mood of this verse is also gentler with two instances of word choices which support this milder tone.

The first is "araish-e-khayal" and the second is "dard"; on the other hand the term "dil kusha" directly indicates the continuity of theme with my last subject.

To suggest these choices, in my literal translation here, I have preferred the word 'soul' over 'heart' for "dil kusha".

Ache was my natural choice for "dard". Ache is a somewhat diffused and milder form of pain sensation, compared with the more intense and acute sensation that the word 'pain' itself generally brings to mind. The original word "dard", in contrast, remains a broad spectrum term for all pain sensations and has been applied to a wide variety of painful experiences in literature and general speech at large (such as heartbreak, grief, aches, and pain resulting from all kinds of physical reasons).

I deduce that this verse refers more broadly to the human experience of pain and its positive consequences felt by the wise, compared with the more specific and extreme end focused on in my last subject.

The poet's choice for "araish-e-khayal" forwards the same conclusion.

The word araaish means decoration, adornment, ornamentation. We decorate our houses, attire, and gift presentations with ideas that are both beautiful and purposeful. Meaningless blemishes do not serve the purpose of ornamentation. Beautiful additions to a basic product enhance its value and amplify its essence. Thus the term araaish-e-khayal combines the concepts of addition to, amplification, improvement and (the resulting) beautification of thought.

Anybody may recall from their life history that positive and stable changes in character follow painful experiences: punishment, embarrassment, shame, guilt, disillusionment.

The wiser mind that has come to realize this pattern early and firmly derives ultimate benefit even from traumas: illness, heartbreaks, breaches of trust, losses, bereavement, accidents.

The mental strength derived from courage in the face of trauma in turn broadens the limits of one's endurance such that the person becomes capable of bearing the intense mental pain of acute existential realizations which in an ordinary person may derive him or her to insanity, dehumanization (along with the antipathy or antisocial behaviors resulting from it), or suicide.

Through all these stages the biggest effect is on the sensitivity, refinery and breadth of one's thought that certainly becomes apparent in one's demeanor, speech, conduct and, as in Nasir's case, verses.

The last line of the verse portrays a Nasir which has already suffered the highs and lows of the pains in his life, has distilled and stored the best in the corners of his heart and mind; so much so that the now (relatively or transiently) in-peace poet sweetly misses the throes that always furthered him on the odyssey of personal transcendence.

The unification of opposites

نہ سمجھو تم اسے شور بہاراں

خزاں پتوں میں چھپ کر رو رہی ہے

Don't take this hum for the gaiety of Spring

Autumn weeps veiled in the greenery

The highly perceptive poet seems to comment here on the duality of nature, or on the singleness of apparent poles.



Symbolically, we may substitute 'spring' here for the colorful and merry reasons of happiness in life: success, money, luxury and facility; and 'autumn' for the opposites of failure, poverty, oppression, and diversity.

The fact that Nasir here seems to see through the gossamer of mirth to the muck of tragedy lurking behind might remind us of a typically socialist view. However, there is a level of sophistication in this poet's poetry that goes beyond.

First of all, Nasir's perspective is not that of 'seeing through' or 'looking beyond'. He renames the very hustle of spring as the moaning autumn. To him, the merry noises of a gay summer are themselves representative of the throes of existence; one only has to change perspective to realize.

Let us try to follow in his steps:

A man laughing with sincere glee has often reached that has laghter through a painful process of assimilating his tragedies..of coming to terms with them.

The intelligence and creativity of many people leaves them alone in crowds as they cannot relate to the surrounding ones at their own level.

I'm siding with this interpretation also because research has shown that creative individuals can naturally reconcile apparent opposites.

However, the tilt of this particular verse is definitely towards sadness.