what is poetry about?

[student_f]

hi everyone!

i'm glad to have found this forum because i have a little problem.
i study english and american literature at a german university and the first topic we dealt with was poetry (not in depth,only for some three or four weeks...).
so far, so good. but although there are some poems which i like (mostly german poems, because the english ones are of course more difficult for me to understand), i was not able till now to grasp the main sense of poetry itself. of course, the poets write about their love or about life and death, nature, war, whatever. but why - apart from the fact, that some poems sound nice or use good metaphors - shall i deal with them, why is it worth to sink my teeth in it and work on it?
i hope you understand what i mean. i don't say, that poetry is worthless or anything like that, but i haven't found a proper acess and so my motivation is not as big as it could be, but because poetry is one of the main parts of literature i want to be motivated and i want to understand, why so many people are so fond of poetry and maybe also become fond of it myself.

it would be great, if you helped me (by the way: is that grammatically correct?? :confused: ;) )

[Virgil]

The best definition of poetry that I have ever come across is that poetry is charged language. Subject matter and style and form can vary and change with time and author and preference, but if the language is not charged, that is elevated or beyond common place, then it is just prose. The appeal of reading poetry is the appreciation of the writer to shape the language and make it above the ordinary. Hope that helps.

[emily655321]

First off, Fridie, you speak English so well! :eek2: I hope someday I can speak German as well as you speak English. Your grammar is fine.

I agree with Virgil, that it is the intensity of poetic language that draws me to it. But I also love the musical nature of poetry. It's the same way that rhythm and melody make music so compelling, and songs can make us feel emotion without us realizing it. To me, meter (the "rhythm" of poetry) and musical devices (like rhyme and alliteration) can do the same thing. When words and ideas are arranged in a beautiful way, it makes the reader more susceptible to the emotions and ideas being communicated. Poetry is almost like hypnosis, wherein it lulls the reader into a trance with its beauty, and gives the ideas behind the words that much more power.

It's also a way of playing with language and making it do things it doesn't normally do, and that's just fun. If you went around speaking like Lewis Carroll poetry, for instance, you'd be carted away, but if there were no poetry, there would never be any slithy toves or mome raths, and that would make me sad.

http://tinypic.com/hso0oj.gif

[jon1jt]

Poetry awakens the soul to remind it of it's humanity... the rest is just everydayness.

[mono]

I agree entirely with all of the above comments, which tend to accord each other with others, and, do not worry, your English looks very impressive!
Answering a question such as "what is poetry about" sounds similar to "why do we travel while walking?" Just as we write poetry while writing, we travel while walking - a natural outcome to a given means and intention.
Most recordings of poetry, I think, began with oral tradition (Homer, which lead to Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, etc.), but evolved quickly into an expression of emotion, free thought, and a tradition of creation (such as with one of the first female poets, Sappho). As time progresses, poetry evolves more and more in eras less than the average human lifespan, but I would like to think that all writers, including poetry, work as the recorders and documenters of the trends (whether common or rare) in thought, emotion, expression, and their connections with mythology, politics, philosophy, ethics, etc.
Welcome to the forum, and I hope you enjoy it here! :nod:

[student_f]

firstly, thank you for your answers. and for your comments on my english ;) i'm glad that you don't see the lot of time it takes me to write a posting... :lol:

what do you do with a poem? do you just read it and than decide, it's nice and worth dealing with it with more intensitity? or do you analize it? or do you just read it several times to discover different things but do not work on it in any analizing way?

i guess, the full meaning and depth of a poem can only be discovered if you search for these hidden things like metaphors and the connection between rhyme scheme and content and stuff like that. but - well, i think that is a bid odd. of course, i do literary studies and that is a science and therefor has to work with scientific methods, but is it not a kind of violating a poem to 'smash' it into pieces, to take it apart and try to find out every detail and every little bit of hidden meaning that might be in a poem? don't you destroy the beauty of the whole with such a 'working'? or is it a fact, that you - if a poem is good (whatever that means) - can discover the whole beauty only by discovering every little part?

okay,lot of questions... :eek:

but there is still one more...:

'slithy toves or mome raths'
(last line of emily's posting)
what does that mean? i could find none of the words in my dictionary... :D ;)

[Virgil]

Like all art, poetry should be enjoyed. Unless there is a teacher proding you to disect it, take the poem as far as you want to. You don't have to tear it apart if you don't want to.

[emily655321]

Hehe... Sorry, F, I forgot that German children probably don't read Lewis Carroll as much as English-speaking children. "Mome raths" and "slithy toves" are creatures created by Lewis Carroll (http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/), the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. They're nonsense words, that don't really mean anything, but Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice what they mean (according to Carroll) in Through the Looking Glass. This is the first stanza of the poem "Jabberwocky" (http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/336/) (which is also a word Carroll invented), with the nonsense words in bold:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wade;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

It's a good example of what I like about poetry, because it doesn't actually mean anything, and yet it's one of the most famous pieces of poetry in the English language, just because it sounds really cool. The sounds of the words somehow set a mood, without the reader quite knowing why.

EDIT: I found it; it's in Chapter 6 (http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/lookingglass/6/) of Through the Looking Glass. According to Humpty Dumpty, the poem, translated, would run something like this:

(By the way, animal definitions: "Toves are something like badgers—they're something like lizards—and they're something like corkscrews." ... "A borogove is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round— something like a live mop." ... "A rath is a sort of green pig.")

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy toves
Did go round and round like a gyroscope, and make holes like a gimlet, in the grass plot around a sun-dial.
All flimsy and miserable were the borogoves,
and the far-from-home raths did something between bellowing and whistling, with a sneeze in the middle.

:D