Before this class, I always thought of poetry as a way of expressing yourself through words. just as musicians express there feeling through an instrument or an artist paints a picture. I think of poetry as something artistic, which means everybody would have a different take on it. If you’ve ever been to an art gallery you will see this, people glare at the picture and share amongst themselves there view on what it can possible mean. This class has proven that. When we read “The Sick Rose” the whole class interpreted the poem in there own way and it was so fascinating to hear the reason why they saw it the way they did. I was amazed the see so many different points of views, each person backed up there view on it and it smarted making sense. That experience made me appreciate poetry a little more.
But what exactly is poetry?, In an online article Called “What is Poetry” by Mark Flanagan, about.com, He said “Poetry is the chiseled marble of language; it’s a paint-spattered canvas – but the poet uses words instead of paint, and the canvas is you. Poetic definitions of poetry kind of spiral in on themselves, however, like a dog eating itself from the tail up. Let’s get nitty. Let’s, in fact, get gritty. I believe we can render an accessible definition of poetry by simply looking at its form and its purpose:
One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word’s emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page. The poet, through innovation in both word choice and form, seemingly rends significance from thin air.”
This is relevant to what I’m saying because he mentions in his article that “Poetry is the chiseled marble of language; it’s a paint-spattered canvas – but the poet uses words instead of paint, and the canvas is you” similar to my music example and the art gallery.But in my opinion I don’t think poetry can truly be defined, poetry itself is so immense that there is no true definition to poetry.
