Understanding and Appreciating Poetry

Poets do not have exact reasons about the world they see or experience: they merely see the invisible, feel it, and write it. The “ideas” are implicit in their own world. Their style or expression is a conscious or deliberate cultivation of abstraction in order to form an essence. The poet is in a trance, or in a state of “epiphany” (a sudden perception of reality) or “hysteric seizure” (intense illumination of a truth to life clothed in beautiful language or expression).

Poetry is hard to define. To Wallace Stevens a poet is “the priest of the invisible”. He sees images and ideas which others may fail to see. Poetry was what John Milton saw when he became blind and wrote “Paradise Lost” , an epic that attempts to justify God’s ways to man.

Poetry is stirred by the use of the imagination. The imagination, in creating an idea, works on the principle of synthesis, “the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits” (Carl Sandburg)-meaning, poetry combines Nature with art (author’s style and technique-his manner of expressing himself).

Figurative language makes poetry the expression of the imagination. With the magic spell of words a poet clothes his idea with “divine” beauty. In his “Defense of Poetry” the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley explains how this is done: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects as if they were not familiar. The impersonations clothed in Elysian (heavenly) light stand in the minds of those who have contemplated them.” This process is called “defamiliarization”: changing the familiar into the unfamiliar by combining and arranging figures of speech and imagery (combination of images) to create a “psychological atmosphere”.

Understanding and appreciating poetry is heightened by learning the artistic or “poetic” functions of language by familiarizing one’s self with the general types of poetry: narrative, lyric, dramatic; the subtypes: satire, descriptive, pastoral, ode, elegy, sonnet, haiku, tangka, limerick, romance, tale, ballad, tragedy, comedy); kinds of images: visual, auditory, motor, tactile, gustatory, olfactory; poetic conventions: meter, rhythm, rhyme; literary devices and figures of speech–alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, repetition, pun, parallelism, rhetorical question, anticlimax, climactic order, simile, metaphor, personification, synecdoche, allusion, metonymy, apostrophe, hyperbole, irony, allegory, litotes, antithesis, meiosis, euphemism, epigram, oxymoron, paradox, chiasmus, syllepsis, and so on.

Carl Sandburg explains poetry as “a language that tells us through a more or less emotional reaction , something that cannot be said.” He added, “I’ve written some poetry I do not understand myself.”