peotry topics

[cacian]

how does non fictional poetry the one that relates to real people/places/incidents compare to non existentialist pieces ie fictional or abstract one?


and do you have a piece about a true person/people/event/places to post here and share?
would be fun to discuss :)

here is one of mine that I really liked. I first read it whilst on holidays in Ireland . It is from none other then Yeats of course.
I also visitied the lake said to have been the topic of this piece.


lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there,
a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there,
for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now,
for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway,
or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core. -

[Nick Capozzoli]

I'm not sure you can make a meaningful distinction between "fictional" and "non-fictional" poetry. You cite Yeats' Innisfree, which refers to a real place. You could just as well have cited poems Yeats wrote about the Easter Rebellion or other "real" events or persons. There is certainly a large opus of "occasional" poems that refer to actual events and people, ranging from the Illiad to much more recent stuff. Even something like Sunday Morning could be seen as a "non-fictional" poem describing some woman sipping coffee and eating oranges on a "sunny chair" somewhere in seaside Connecticut... I suppose that we could view the Odyssey as more "fictional" than "real," but even there the character of Odysseus seems to have some grounding in historical reality.

What is probably more important to us as readers of poetry is how "real" the poem seems to us. Great poetry, regardless of whether or not the subject is relatable to historically verifiable persons or events, may be judged on its ability to evoke in the reader the sense that the poem presents "real" human experience.