This is a series of essays I'm planning on writing about my thoughts on poetry: Different forms of poetry, what makes good poetry, the challenges of writing it, and the aesthetics of it. Everything is my own opinion, but feel free to voice yours.
On Poetry as an Artform As an art, poetry is the most demanding to enjoy and to write, and the reason why it has not been as appreciated and simplified comes from a lack of understanding on this point.
Let me explain. Many arts solely focus on the sense of vision: Painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture. Music, on the other hand, is an art of hearing. And indeed, each art is well suited for the role it has adapted to: We admire beautiful works of art with our eyes, and hear beautiful strains of music with our ears. As an art, poetry represents the synthesis of the two: One must see the words and hear them. But there is something beyond this that must blend the two together, or else what we see cannot connect with what we hear, and vice versa. This is the power of comprehension, a cognitive function that is uniquely human. This synthesis has several ramifications. Visual art and music are heavily dependent on technicality: The better someone is with the medium, the instrument, the more aesthetically pleasing the piece is. While poetry certainly has its share of technicality, the core of poetry lies in its meaning, in what is comprehended. Let us put it this way: A work of visual art or a piece of music can look good or sound good with no meaning at all, but a poem with no meaning at all cannot look or sound good whatsoever. This presents a special challenge. We live in a world that discourages comprehension. People want things in bite-sized chunks, and they want it now. I myself am not immune to this type of thinking. But poetry in its refined state is not simply something you can look at or listen to and immediately realize its aesthetic nature. There must be some level of comprehension, however shallow it is, to understand that it says something. Itâs the nature of the word.
I can't help but agree, however I must question one thing, if poetry is the synthesis of visual art and music, does it not need a rhythm just as much as it needs a meaning?
I have come to be that, while any art can have rhythm an meaning, peotry has ability to redifine the concept of both the meaning and comprehension of the world around us. With that said, it also has an infinite effect of similar matters on the intangible things in life.
Kyouzou's question jumps ahead to my second point: The Four Elements of Poetry. Knowing these elements will not only help you to be an effective writer, they will also give you a guideline to read, understand, and critique poetry.
On the Four Elements of Poetry As most schooled people will know, poetry manifests itself in a variety of different ways. The haiku, the limerick, the sonnet, free verseâ¦the tendency, however, is to read poetry in a one-dimensional fashion. From what I have learned of poetry, it does have core elements to it, but these elements are so intertwined with each other that we cannot separate them. Each must complement each other, or the poem fails.
What are the categories? They are form, prosody, diction, and meaning. Remember that in the previous essay, I mentioned that poetry is the synthesis of visual and audible senses tied together by comprehension. The first two are manifestations of the visual and audible, respectively, while the latter two have a great deal to do with comprehension. Of course, they all affect each other in very subtle ways, but for the moment we shall categorically analyze each element.
Form entails two main things. The first is what we would typically think of when we hear of a poetic form: haikus, limericks, sonnets. The form of a poem can follow a given guideline or formula, specifically designed to enhance the aesthetic of the piece, or it can follow its own form. The latter is covered in the second point of form: How a poem looks. The fundamental unit of form is the line.
Prosody is a term that specifically refers to how a poem sounds. Meter, rhyme, syllable counts, inflections, rhythmâ¦this is the element that most people remember the best when they quote a line of a poem. But poetry does not have to follow a certain form to have prosody. Urban and spoken poetry is heavily dependent on prosody. Even free verse is not exempt from having to sound good. The fundamental unit of prosody is (in English, at least) the foot, while in other languages and forms it is the syllable (in East Asian poetry).
Diction refers to the words used in the poem itself. Seeing that poetry is the use of words as a medium for art, diction is vastly important. The denotations and connotations of a word are of prime importance, and a good poet will use effective choice of words and phrases to drive forth into a deeper comprehension. The use of rhetorical technique is also important to diction; the order or the manner in which you state something can radically change the meaning. The fundamental unit of diction is, unsurprisingly, the word.
Meaning works at a larger scope than the other three, but even in itself it is comprised of many different scopes. At its grandest scale, the essence of meaning is the theme of the piece. What does it ultimately refer to, and what question does it pose or solve? What truth does a poem try to expose? Meaning can also expose itself in much smaller ways as well, through symbols, allegory, allusion, and comparison, for example. The fundamental unit of meaning is the idea.
Let me emphasize again: These elements are not mutually exclusive from one another. For instance, the word you choose will affect how the poem sounds and how it looks, and what it contributes to the theme. They are highly dependent on each other. The reason I distinguish these four elements is to provide a framework to look at and analyze a poem, and to really understand its nuances.
Effective poetry does not ignore any of these elements, even the poems that seem almost insubstantial. And while a poem may draw a focus on a certain element, if any are absent, the poem has no chance of stimulating deep understanding.
