Does Poetry Make Anything Happen?

[Paulclem]

The idea that poetry, or any art form, replaces experience does not imply it replaces with the experience of the poet (or painter, singer). You relate or react to a piece, because it can find on your the previous experience which have in your memory a similar "feeling taste".

So, when we read poem, we do not have the same feeling or experience of the writer. But it "clicks" on the feelings (all prety basic), which brings us memories, with that our own experience. So can live the feelings similar to your first kiss, but you cannt actually have a first kiss.

A bit like Wordsworth idea of memory and writing poetry. As many things, we can move writing to reading.

I see and agree with that. Thanks.

[Paulclem]

Richards' is not talking about the mere act of reading poetry. Of course reading isn't the same as living. But what we read (if we are serious readers) strongly influences how we live, and how we live (if we are serious in this sense as well--that is, well-rounded, emotionally adjusted, intellectually curious, and imaginatively vigorous) strongly influences what we read and how. Poetry is part of the continuum of experience (as you suggest by your reference to culture), but the blind force of culture itself cannot be the sole criterion of value in aesthetic or literary matters (unless we are willing to concede relativistic merit to Hitler's repressive standards of art). It is the epitome of culture with which we ought to concern ourselves, i.e. "the poet" (who is a metonymy for the Artist par excellence). Richards' point is that the poetry of genius is the epitome of experience (from which culture follows). Poets, in his view, are better experiencers, so to speak, than the rest of us, so we should endeavor to be more like them. I admit that this view is shockingly grandiose and strongly suggestive of displaced religious sentiment (e.g. "be like Christ"), but I find it refreshing and stimulating despite its superlatives. These sentiments were the foundation on which academic English was originally constructed, until French structuralist theories "deconstructed" the edifice of humanism and gave us postmodernism. I personally see more cutting edge potential in a return to the old school humanism of our grandfathers than in the tedious identity politics of "cultural studies" and "postcolonialism."

Hulme referred to Romanticism as "spilt religion." But Richards, Leavis, et al. weren't so far off the mark. Pejorative implications aside, poetry is in many ways akin to religion. There is an argument to be made here, although I doubt it would be very popular in the secular humanities. For one, the language of poetry and the language of religion have much in common. Most noticably, they both tend to work metaphor in a degree unparalleled by other discourses, and, arguably, they both privilege the emotive dimension of language over its referential or strictly propositional dimension. Where Richards and Leavis might have said they both chiefly concern the complex expression of feeling, a postmodernist might say they both privilege the signifier over the signified: "In the beginning was the Word."

What are we doing when we read poetry, or any serious literature for that matter, and how does it resemble or differ from what we do when we read scripture (assuming that we read it, or that we used to read it)? This isn't a question for everyone, I admit, but you don't have to be religious to look into it. I used to read the Bible as Truth, but now I only read it as literature. Though, I have enormous difficulty stating exactly what this distinction implies, hence my question.

I see reading poetry, and the experience of it as much more reflective upon past experiences, rather than instilling a sense of action/ purpose / direction in life. I think these could be fulfilled better with religion and/or politics. Interestingly, you refer to poetry as using religious language, but politics also does. I'm thinking in particular of communism as manifest in Russia, which employed a religious language to poitical ends.

[Theunderground]

The quran i have read in its original arabic and it makes dante and Milton seem lightweight. Still most poetry seems conceptual idolatry and garallousness.

[Ecurb]

Garrulousness? I would think poetry would be the opposite of garrulous -- succinct and to the point. I'll grant that I've never read the quran in the original arabic, though, so I might be wrong.

"One can't
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it."
— A.R. Ammons

[Cunninglinguist]

The quran i have read in its original arabic and it makes dante and Milton seem lightweight. Still most poetry seems conceptual idolatry and garallousness.

Paradise Lost was an attack on idolatry. Also certain parts of the Comedy can be construed as endorsing an allegorical understanding of the Bible. I can believe that the Koran, just as the Bible, is arguably a deeper piece of literature than both (still, Paradise Lost was written as an intentional challenge to the Bible, and I would place it above) - notwithstanding, Blake is still a kindergartner, and, when compared to these religious texts, even more lightweight.

[Theunderground]

I open to new things,if anybody can show me a profound poem by a poet i will gladly have a read.
As it is im not impressed by any epics or sonnets. (though to think again,Heine has some great little flighty poems.)
Now shakespeares' Hamlet? A more profound piece of literature i have never come across in my life,nor anything close.

[MessyRoom]

W.H. Auden, one of the greatest poets of the century just past, wrote the gorgeous elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"published a year after Yeats's death in January, 1939.

A fragment of a line in that poem reads:
"For poetry makes nothing happen. . ."

I read that line twice yesterday: in the morning when I was looking for models of elegies and later yesterday afternoon in an article on Slate.com. (By the bye, the author of the Slate article misattributed the line to Ezra Pound.)

Anyway, I wonder if our brilliant LitNetters might discuss their thoughts on of Auden's poetic statement.

Do you think poetry matters at all? Does it matter to anyone other than people who think they write poetry or actual readers of poetry, the number of the latter alas considerably smaller than the latter.

Why do so few people read poetry today?

Does poetry make anything at all "happen"? If so, what happens. Why? How?

I'm eagerly anticipating a multitude of replies.

Auntie

Poetry, if the reader understands it, provides a new way of looking at a subject. It doesn't make something happen. It reveals a new perspective on a subject that influences a person into creating a change in his/her life.

[Ecurb]

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

According to Auden, poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth”. Prose can be translated or paraphrased, because the meaning is in the conventional meanings of the words and sentences. Poetry cannot be paraphrased. Once, Robert Frost was flirting with a young girl over dinner. “I like your new poem, Mr. Frost,” she gushed. “But what does it mean?”

“Do you want me to say it over again in worser English,” snarled Frost.

But of course poetry does make things happen. Although the weather and madness of Ireland may not be subject to its spells, when someone writes a poem he creates something new – a pattern of words upon the previously blank page or a pattern of sound waves in previously still air. Surely that’s “something”.

As I said earlier, perhaps Auden was referring to the conscious effort of Yeats and other Modern Poets to be the new prophets of a post-religious age. That didn’t happen. But just because what was MEANT to happened failed to happen, we cannot assume that “nothing” happened.

[Paulclem]

Y


But of course poetry does make things happen. Although the weather and madness of Ireland may not be subject to its spells, when someone writes a poem he creates something new – a pattern of words upon the previously blank page or a pattern of sound waves in previously still air. Surely that’s “something”.

I doubt if that was what was meant by the OP. It's like saying today causes tomorrow. I interpreted it to mean in an external sense -on top of what it does to those of us who read poetry.

I think poetry might serve a particular emotional purpose - which makes it different to the purposes of reading novels. It's more like listening to music but with words and ideas re-examined or subjects framed in a new perspectve.

[Ecurb]

I doubt if that was what was meant by the OP. It's like saying today causes tomorrow. I interpreted it to mean in an external sense -on top of what it does to those of us who read poetry.

I think poetry might serve a particular emotional purpose - which makes it different to the purposes of reading novels. It's more like listening to music but with words and ideas re-examined or subjects framed in a new perspectve.

Of course that's not what Auden meant -- that's why I quoted the whole stanza of the poem to clarify his meaning. "Ireland has her madness and her weather still." So Auden is saying that poetry is not a magical incantation that can make physical events happen. It can't change the weather ("Rain, rain go away, come again some other day" doesn't work). I was just pointing out that there are other ways (some psychological, but others, which I mentioned, merely prosaic and physical) in which poetry clearly does make things happen.

[Paulclem]

Of course that's not what Auden meant -- that's why I quoted the whole stanza of the poem to clarify his meaning. "Ireland has her madness and her weather still." So Auden is saying that poetry is not a magical incantation that can make physical events happen. It can't change the weather ("Rain, rain go away, come again some other day" doesn't work). I was just pointing out that there are other ways (some psychological, but others, which I mentioned, merely prosaic and physical) in which poetry clearly does make things happen.

I see. You mean that despite the failure to achieve the original purpose, there were cultural repecussions that occurred because of the attempt?

[Cunninglinguist]

Now shakespeares' Hamlet? A more profound piece of literature i have never come across in my life,nor anything close.

Well, in that, many of us are the same.

Poetry, if the reader understands it, provides a new way of looking at a subject. It doesn't make something happen. It reveals a new perspective on a subject that influences a person into creating a change in his/her life.

Is not an "influence" a happening? Then, since poetry influences us, it makes something happen.

[Ezekiel 4:9]

On a coherence theory, at any rate, politics is bad poetry, and so it religion in many respects.

[MorpheusSandman]

I open to new things,if anybody can show me a profound poem by a poet i will gladly have a read.

Profound in what sense? I think if you're looking for the same kind of philosophical or religious profundity that you gain from philosophical or religious texts then you're after the wrong kind of profundity. Not that great thought can't be expressed in poetry, but rather I find poetry's at it's most profound when it's capturing those small moments that tend to escape the grandest prose, plays, and religious texts. I've read Lycidas at least 100 times, and I still find myself tearing up at the end. I still don't know why, either. The aesthetic, intellectual, sensuous, emotional odyssey it takes me on in such a short span (really, little more than a few songs' length if you're reading at a normal pace) is simply extraordinary. If that's not profundity, I don't know what is.

[Theunderground]

I mean profound in the sense that it 'moves' me,not in an intellectual or necessarily philosophical sense but emotionally. Hamlet being the perfect example. I find that i very rarely get this from 'normal' poetry but more often in plays and prose. (eg notes from the underground.)