Poetry
52nd installment to my philosophical system.
I am a thoroughly absent-minded man when it comes to the strengths of poetry. If my heart could preach poetry, it would smack of the pulpit and would, perhaps, sound like a panegyric on Lucifer, as if I were preaching the word of the devil himself—not much different from the manner in which Milton made Satan such a seductive figure of immorality, or how Goethe made Mephisto the epitome of man’s self-justification for his own desires.
In poetry, unlike prose, there’s always an opportunity for the spirit to shine forth. If one is dead in prose, one is dead in ideas and can hardly write a sentence; but in poetry, even having no idea is a potentially momentous event for the page.
When one decides to strike out their own path in thought and give vent to it in language, it will naturally follow one of two paths: either it is written in prose or in poetry. One can be poetic in prose or prose-like in poetry, but more often than not a writer—long constrained by school assignments and worthless exercises—fails to break the mold in which they were cast while going through school and acquiring the rudiments of their native tongue.
This has such a deleterious effect on the writer that everything they write from that point forward—assuming they do not read deeply or write plentifully outside of class—will always be stamped with the mark of a utilitarian-like prose that answers questions perfectly but in a very formulaic or robotic manner; this continues in their life and makes it so that, after a long enough time has passed, they’re unable to assimilate new conceptions due to the fact that their brain has fossilized and stagnated, forever thinking repetitively but never in a new light.
Writers can always be distinguished from one another by their turns of phrase. Every author, before they write, should have in their mind a clear idea of what they wish to say, and if clarity is lacking, then at least have brevity—for the patience of the reader must always be taken into account when writing on any subject.
The way in which writing is taught today is woefully boring and does very little to engage the mind. The reason is quite simple, too: it stems from rote learning. When a child writes, they express the first idea that comes to their head, and more often than not is this idea very clear, for it merely relates a direct experience from their own life; in this sense, the child is actually a better writer than the adult, for their mind is yet to be addled with rubrics and standardized curricula.
The problem, however, is that as the child progresses through their education, they progressively adopt a habit of writing whose sole function is utility—and in this context, that means nothing more than answering what is asked of them on the teacher’s lesson plan; writing, in that sense, becomes a matter of molding your own unique style to the teacher’s standards rather than your own—and with the teacher’s standards being only a reflection of the board of education’s standards, if one is to pass the class, it becomes necessary to play along and not veer too far outside of what is demanded for the sake of the assignment.
This is where all creativity in writing goes to die, and is directly responsible for stultifying the child’s brain to the point where they can no longer conceive of ideas without first churning them through a reductive, nonsensical process which conforms them to a mold without any input from themselves; there’s no subjectivity in what they say, and so no real honesty, and as a result, they think only in terms of a reaction upon being asked a question—in which, as soon as they process the question, they go through a database of premeditated answers as a direct response. Granted, this isn’t inherently bad, for, in fact, most daily interactions are conversations we’ve already had a million times, and so they don’t require any more thinking to answer them than is necessary; when it comes to writing, however, this is where all things fall flat and fade to black—everyone approaches writing today in the same manner they approach a conversation with a stranger, and so everything sounds boring and monotonous like a clacking mill. If only everyone recalled that maxim of Schopenhauer’s that:
If a man has something to say that is worth saying, he need not envelop it in affected expressions, involved phrases, and enigmatical innuendoes; but he may rest assured that by expressing himself in a simple, clear, and naïve manner he will not fail to produce the right effect. A man who makes use of such artifices as have been alluded to betrays his poverty of ideas, mind, and knowledge. —On Style.
And also:
Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style… If they would only go honestly to work, and say, quite simply, the things they have really thought, and just as they have thought them, these writers would be readable and, within their own proper sphere, even instructive. But instead of that, they try to make the reader believe that their thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case. They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in a forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix periods which go round and round the thought and wrap it up in a sort of disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of communicating what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets the eye. —Ibid.
But let me express a little more on this point. Nothing is more hollow than an author’s attempt to project an intellect he does not possess; such vanity only betrays a terrifying inner void, for we only mimic what we fundamentally lack. True brilliance resides in naïveté—the raw audacity to show oneself as one is. In the desert of the artificial, only the simple and the natural offer a point of contact with reality. Style, in this respect, is merely the silhouette of thought. To write with vagueness or obscurity is not a sign of depth, but a confession of a confused mind—a soul struggling to articulate a truth it cannot yet grasp.
He who truly thinks finds the words; he who does not merely builds a labyrinth of ambiguity to hide the fact that he has nothing to say. The author must maintain a chastity of style, for every redundant word is a theft of the reader’s finite existence. Truth, in its nakedness, is the only beauty that endures. It requires no rhetorical ornaments, which serve only to deceive and corrupt. We must strip away the superfluous until only the thing itself remains, vibrating in the silence. Ultimately, a careless style is an act of self-contempt. If a man does not honor his own thoughts with the inexhaustible patience required to find their perfect expression, he admits they are worthless. The classics endure because their creators treated thought as a holy relic, housing the fleeting spark of their existence in a vessel of gold—refusing to let the truth of their being vanish into the fog of the unsaid.
Unfortunately, no one today understands or appreciates the beauty that is to be found in a brevity that is their own, rather than a mock-simplicity that is forced on them through a process of reducing the whole of an idea to a reaction in response to some vain, patronizing question—a question that does not demand their attention and does not command their respect.
I swear, it’s as if every literature student after elementary school is put into a mold they cannot break free from, and if they attempt to, they’re punished with a bad grade; such is why every essay sounds the same, and why every student, when asked to explain something, resorts to the most common, dry, unoriginal turns of phrase which everyone knows but which nobody likes to hear: honestly, there’s no difference between an essay written by a student with dyslexia and a valedictorian; both think exactly the same, the only difference is the valedictorian knows how to make it sound more fancy, more intelligent, more “well-thought-out,” but aside from that you may as well be reading something produced by ChatGPT—they’re virtually identical.
This is, by the way, only speaking of prose, for poetry isn’t even taught in high school anymore (at least it wasn’t where I went); it’s considered so beyond the pale, and not within the demands of a future employer (as if that mattered), that verse, meter, rhyme, rhythm, and prosody are left out to die without hope of ever being resuscitated. To think, the man considered the greatest writer in the English language—possibly the greatest writer of all time—hardly wrote any prose at all; I find it funny that the only times Shakespeare would write in prose for his plays was when he was introducing an ancillary plot point via a minor character, or was deliberately distinguishing character status—usually reserving prose for the lower classes or for the comic relief characters. Perhaps the best example of this is found in his Twelfth Night, Act 1, scene 5, where the Fool interacts with Olivia after the death of her brother:
FOOL Good madonna, why mourn’st thou?
OLIVIA Good Fool, for my brother’s death.
FOOL I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.
FOOL The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen.
OLIVIA What think you of this Fool, Malvolio? Doth he not mend?
MALVOLIO Yes, and shall do till the pangs of death shake him. Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better Fool.
FOOL God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for the better increasing your folly! Sir Toby will be sworn that I am no fox, but he will not pass his word for twopence that you are no fool.
It would take a fool, in all honesty, to not see the beauty in this interaction right here. Not only does the Fool reveal the absurdity of mourning for someone already in heaven, but he also plays Malvolio like a fiddle when he wishes upon him infirmity in order to make him a better fool; it’s such a lovely, playful engagement, while at the same time being a somewhat serious matter—but Shakespeare had a way of making words bend to his will and was able to make even death a comical thing, all the while simultaneously being a stern reflection on how to combat the pangs of death through humor. Humor doth make a man out of his mind, and with his brain being so far from his skull, he walks around empty-headed, searching for it, till it finds its way back into his head by accidentally dropping into it. I like to think reason often hits a man in the same exact manner: by accident and when it was least expected.
But I think I ought now to discuss poetry proper. Laurence Sterne says a damn good thing on poetry: “… no vent in prose is equal to that of poetry.” What does this imply? That poetry, in all its humors, is far superior to prose when it comes to expressing the uncommon in the common. You may recall earlier that I said if you are dead in prose, you are merely without ideas; but to be dead in poetry is to invite the spirit.
Prose is the labor of the intellect, where the mind staves off idleness by being able to continuously write sentences that deal with the matter at hand; the only downside to this being it’s very easy to write with brevity (at least for me), and thus gives your work an air of dilettantism: forget that nonsense, though; Schopenhauer already showed us the way—the best path in writing prose is the clearest one.
(The greatest ideas are often timeless because of how simple they are, and it should never be forgotten that the more one writes on a topic, the more that implies that the topic is still either in its infancy or the writer simply wishes to make it appear more profound than it really is. The amount of writing needed to explain an idea is proportionate to its complexity divided by the author’s ability to write simply.)
Poetry, on the other hand, is the play of the soul. It comes upon a mind from without—that is, not deliberately called upon by the will—but reveals great treasures from within; where one is likely to make sounds regarding a thing they saw in boring prose, the poet is one to soar leaps and bounds above whatever prolix sentence was scribbled out—hardly legible!—in some scrapbook. Where prose turns the flux of life into an elegant statue, should the person be a decent writer, poetry leaves the dynamic motion of existence very much intact and, in fact, adds to the sensations by heightening them with hyperboles and sensationalisms; where life is, there is poetry, because poetry represents life in its truest light—by being a mirror with respect to perception.
Poetry allows for one to vent greater than in prose because poetry is not constrained by the structure of an idea primarily—you hardly see periods in poetry for that reason. Rather, what one has in poetry is the purest form of expression, whose ideal is to make the envisioned experience come alive in the words written. A poet must be able to dance across the page rather than merely move along it uniformly left to right. If one lacks the capacity to see the star which resides inside their heart, then they’re not up to the task of writing poetry; poetry demands life and an imagination more alive than the action which inspired the poem in the first place.
There’s no end to the variety of experiences which one finds themselves confronted with as they live; and so, naturally, there have been poems written on just about every topic under the sun. Again, this variety is caused not by the multitude of experiences which a man can possibly take part in per se, but in his ability to amplify the experiences he has taken part in in order to make them tangible—even alive—to one who has not experienced them.
Poetry, at bottom, expresses everything which is felt but which does not have a reason behind it. When men speak on reason, they always do so dishonestly, for they presume to know more than they do, and in such a state they make themselves guarantors of a lie and protect the entrance to heaven by actually working not far from hell. Poetry itself is its own reason, for, like any other work of art, it exists partly by accident and partly by an earnest desire to relive the experience which gave occasion for it. What poetry offers the soul of man is a part of himself back. Who—upon reading a canto of Dante’s or a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—isn’t called back to life, so to say, and filled with a strong desire to produce something similar?
Speaking for myself here, I can recall many a miscellanea made from my own hand after having read a few lines of a good poet. The problem with poetry is that, unlike prose, it’s infectious; a good poet makes you wish to see all things as a poet would which, for more cases than it’s good for, is not entirely helpful in apprehending the situation of a thing; it is, however, to be preferred if you be either a poet or a man who simply wishes to see everything from a more transcendent, real, human, and, in truth, beautiful view than you normally would.
It cannot be helped if one fails to find words when speaking of something as grand as poetry, for, in all honesty, no man has ever been an equal to it, only a conduit for it—a man receiving inspiration from a source unknown, but which he knows in his heart as right. Unlike good prose, which is very time-consuming and has to normally follow the last sentence which was laid down, poetry could be anything: the shortest poem in the world is literally a four-legged “m”—a combination of the letters ‘m’ and ‘n’—by Aram Saroyan.
Poetry is free while prose is enslaved to conventions and an innate desire for consistency within the narrative; that is why poetry is both easier to write extemporaneously but harder to write deliberately—that is to say, it’s easier to write good prose purposefully than good poetry; and, it should go without saying, bad poetry is more rampant than bad prose. For this reason, Goethe recommended that all poetry only be written in the spur of the moment, when the initial sensation is most strongly felt, and while the character of the world appears in its fullest light due to the harmony between ourselves and our surroundings. To quote Goethe on poetry,
All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life. —Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (26 November 1825).
And on literary production in general he says:
The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.
Notice how Goethe mentions the world within him and the world outside of him; this here is his inner poet speaking, for in such moments of inspiration, the subject-object divide we normally make in reality collapses into one, and we see the world in a fuller light, more in the manner of a sage or prophet than anything else. The poet is one who is able to recognize when the world calls him and when his moment has come in order to write something pretty upon it.
The strongest gift a poet must have is their ability to see beyond the mere appearance of things, and, at all times, imbue the ordinary with an extraordinary life of its own; as Da Vinci said, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” That is what all must strive to do, for without it life becomes a sterile routine which just as quickly becomes barbarous, even if you’re well-off from all your repetitions.
In closing, if I may attempt to answer the age-old question regarding the difference between prose and poetry, I would venture the following: it consists solely in how one relates the material; in prose, it is (more often than not) orderly, consistent, and rigidly structured in order to convey a kind of narrative with respect to the ideas; in poetry, it is as open to interpretation as can possibly be, and is really only limited by the imagination, which is to say not limited at all: it is for this reason that the best prose actually approaches poetry—not purple prose, but concise prose that flows like a free verse poem of Whitman, or an essay from Joseph Addison, or a sermon from Jonathan Edwards or John Bunyan. Prose captures the world, but poetry captures both the world and the spirit which moves within it.
If I may speak from my own experience for a moment, poetry is fun to write when you feel it is the time to write it, but an impossible thing to do deliberately; not being a natural poet and being one more inclined to good prose than verse, I’ve found poetry more admirable than instructive—something to be read and loved but not something to actively practice or cultivate. I’ve found no general improvement in my prose after reading Milton as opposed to Thomas Browne or Samuel Johnson, both to whom I owe half my style and nearly all my wit, for they, to me (alongside Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson) are perhaps the greatest writers in English.
Poetry is a plaything of the witty and vivacious—those who have a lot of time on their hands and who are able to take the sensuous joys of life and amplify them to a pitch not normally heard; for me, however, having no real wit and being far too stern in my manners to allow the pleasures of life to take on a life of their own in my head—I was raised a Catholic after all—I find in poetry all that life can afford, for it contains all that a scholar could wish to enjoy out of life, were they not spending their time like Faust hunched over a book reading about pleasure rather than actually partaking in it.
I suppose it is a thing to be lamented, but at the same time, it remains an ardent wish whose flame would quickly go out the moment it was embarked upon. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. That is the only poetry a prose writer like myself could appreciate; although, I feel it would be remiss if I did not end this essay by giving mention to the honorable Edward Young, whose magnum opus Night-Thoughts will always hold a place in my heart as the nearest conception to perfect poetry I could envision, and for that reason shall always be my ideal whenever I think upon the subject.