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Five Misconceptions about Poetry
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“In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.” —BASHO (Translated by Lucien Stryk) |
Some say a poem is a kind of song or a prayer; it’s both controlled and uncontrollable, a flight of the imagination, or it comes from a dream state. It is both inspiration (breath & movement) and perspiration (a poet’s practice of craft).
A poem is a made thing. And, according to literary critic Ed Hirsch, writing a poem “is a soul-making activity . . . [p]oems communicate before they are understood and the structure operates on, or inside, the reader even as the words infiltrate the consciousness.”
POETRY AND MUSIC
Imagine yourself driving down the road, listening to your favorite song, either singing along or just grooving to the beat. Your passenger in the seat next to you asks, innocently, “What does this song mean?” You stop; you think. It’s your favorite song. But what can you say?
“No idea. I just like it.”
Do you feel bad about that? We hope not. You are welcome to “just like it.”
- Of course, we can ask what the song is about, what it means, but we know we don’t have to ask in order to like it. Most songs do have meanings. We know that.
- We also probably know that the meaning of a song is not limited to the lyrics; a song expresses its meaning through the lyrics and the music. We all immediately understand that words like “I’ll love you always and forever” have one meaning when they are sung to a tender, lilting, melody and a very different meaning when they are shouted over screeching guitars.
- Poems have a lot in common with music. Poems can be enjoyed for their sound and rhythm alone, or even for their structure; they can be appreciated for how they make us feel without conscious consideration of meaning. But they also have a meaning. As with songs, the meaning of a poem is never absolutely separate from the meaning of its sounds and rhythms—its music. We don’t have drums and electric guitars and pianos in poems; but rhythm and sound and structure still carry meaning, and, like poets, we readers can learn how this works.
Our most fundamental job in this to help you to discover how poems create meaning through language and structure and rhythm and sound.
Five Myths That Make Poems Harder to Love
In our more than 30 years of teaching poetry in colleges and universities, we’ve observed that students tend to approach the subject from certain common half-truths or misconceptions. We’ll call them myths. Although these myths are not true and not even compatible with each other, a number of students believe all of them.
1) It’s all subjective: Some students believe that poems have no real meanings at all. When they read a poem, these students think, “I can think anything I want about the poem. It’s all interpretation, and there are no right and wrong answers.”
2) Poems are nothing but ideas that rhyme: Some students