Understanding Poetry - Contents of The Book - Introduction

Introduction

People communicate not just to convey information for businesslike practical reasons, they also convey feelings and attitudes. Telling a joke, passing the time in conversation and greeting old friends are some examples, and poetry is another. Some propositions — including many involving values, emotions, feelings, attitudes and judgments — can't be conveyed through communicating practical information or with scientific precision. Like science, literature (and especially poetry) uses a specialized language for the purposes of precision in matters different from science.

In ordinary life, people must deal with forms of communication that use some of the methods of poetry, including editorials, sermons, political speeches, advertisements and magazine articles. Yet when approaching poems, many people confuse practical or "scientific" kinds of communication with poetic communication, sometimes as a way of justifying their interest in poetry, and so fall into certain mistakes.

One mistake is "message-hunting" — looking only for a profitable statement or idea in a poem. A short prose statement can work better than a poem for communicating advice. Something else is at work in poetry.

Another mistake is thinking that poetry deals only with emotion or sensation, or even thinking that poetry can express an emotion such as grief the way tears would express it, or bring up the emotion in the reader. But poetry can never do that as well as real experience, the authors say, and a poem, such as Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, used as an example here, may really convey the poet's interpretation of an experience.

A third common mistake is an attempt to mechanically combine the first two, defining poetry as the "beautiful statement of some high truth", or "truth" with "decorations". This mistake can lead to thinking of poems as collections of pretty language pleasing for its associations with pleasant things. But even Shakespeare and Milton wrote fine passages bringing up unpleasant and disagreeable associations. The things represented don't themselves shape the poetic effect, which depends on the "kind of use the poet makes of them."

These mistakes look at poems in a mechanical way rather than in an organic way in which the elements (such as meter, rhyme, figurative language, along with attitude and emotion) need to be understood to be acting in a fundamental, intimate, organic way with each other.

The introduction also states (but doesn't develop the thought )that poems are inherently dramatic, with an implied speaker who reacts to a situation, scene or idea.

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