What is poetry? Poetry can be “prosey” (think of prose poems) and prose can be “poetic.” There’s an enormous range of mood and approach within each. So?

Definitions are as numerous as poets. I can think of several things to say to describe poetry, but in the end, poetry is words. Robert Frost defined poetry as “what gets lost in translation.” John Hall Wheelock put it well, “A poem will result when the genius of a language—its words, their sound and their sense—offers the genius of a poet an opportunity to perform a miracle. That masterpiece of coincidence, that achieved miracle, the poem, with its unique syllabic patterns, its unique consonantal and vowel music, its seemingly inevitable cadences (partly the result of skill, partly the result of sheer good luck), is not translatable.”

Some claim poetry is a way of knowing. Language is human’s greatest achievement. We can use words to symbolize, or stand in for, complex experience. A poem is a “constellation of such symbols, representing a poet’s rediscovery of some phase of reality.” (Wheelock) It’s a rediscovery because as we become familiar with things we lose sight of them; we take what we know and experience for granted. Poetry, like any of the arts, is a revelation. It gives the poet’s world back to the poet. Poetry reveals what we know to ourselves. However, poems often require imagination and familiarity with the conventions of the art to be understood. In fact, to some poets, the more obscure and erudite the poem, the better. They want to keep the reader in the dark. It isn’t surprising that poetry often has a bad rap. Goethe’s advice, “Don’t tell it to anyone except the initiated, because the multitude will only jeer at you.” More than obscure, modern poetry has been accused of being cerebral, and empty of feeling. Wordsworth might define poetry as “emotion recollected in anxiety with distaste.”

Poetry might be considered a form of communication, or better, communion within a universal fellowship. The poem doesn’t come as a desire to communicate, but is what happens when a poet rediscovers some part of her lost reality, because it has “been overlaid by the veil of familiarity.” (Shelley) The poem is part of the rediscovery—through it the poet learns what she has forgotten. You might say the poet is talking to herself, established communication with herself, and through that with others. “What was subject has become object. What was on the inside is now on the outside.” (Wheelock)

Poetry changed radically over the last century. T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s work began a revolution. They shifted focus from the  Romanticism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Perception began to overtake emotion in poetry. Poetry shifted to a more observational style with less searching for meaning. Mid-century poetry has been described as analytic, precise, and emotionally uninvolved, rather a scientific method. Poetry left the realm of common knowledge and imagery and moved into a private system of reference, essentially: classical references have given way to intensely personal experience. This isn’t surprising as not all readers and poets share the same background of knowledge anymore, but some lament the loss of feeling. Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “We only move it through the mind…/Perhaps the deeper tragedy/ Is then the inability/ To change a thought into emotion.”

We’ve all heard the many opinions of modern verse. One complaint, it’s lost its music. Free verse can be “disjointed, episodic, and staccato.” (Wheelock) But look at the world that is producing modern poetry. If poetry has become more objective recording and less feeling, it has also become more accessible with the use of common speech.

Wallace Stegner nailed Modernist poetry in his:

“Of Modern Poetry”

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

The Modernists changed the definition of poetry for better or worse. The next post will look at  the further evolution of poetry: Postmodernism.

T. S. Eliot

(Don’t hesitate to comment with your definition!)

Adapted from What is Poetry?, John Hall Wheelock, 1963, Charles Scribner’s and Sons

- John Hall Wheelock

Peruse through Wheelock’s Collected and you won’t find another poem as memorable or as good as this. As Einstein said:

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

O LOVE, now the herded billows over the holy plain
Of the trampled sea move thunderously, and cast
Their wrath on the dark shore—let us set out again,
Let us make seaward, and be gone at last.

Into the choiring, clashing, wild waste of waters strown 
Around us,—forward—forward—, and leave behind
The little frets and the fevers, just we two alone,
Heart-free, as once in days long out of mind!

Forget the city and all its troubles, leave forever
Our dusty ways! The Eternal ’round us rolled 
Shall wash us white of the little sins and fears that sever,
Lave us, and leave us lovers as of old—

….

Light!–Light!  The astounded, far fields of ocean shine
Sheer gold and shimmering amber… 

… and little words unspoken
Trouble your lips; dumbly dumbly we know
Something starry and strange, that the world’s wheel has broken,
Come back to us out of the long-ago.

Our hearts drink the wrath and the wonder, the breath of the boundless spaces
Hallows our foreheads, the exceeding might
Of moving waters around is music, and on our faces
The glory of God is shed, His holy light! 

~From Storm and Sun by John Hall Wheelock

Sometimes you want to proverbially, or literally, “leave behind us frets and fevers” and launch forward into the unknown.  Unknowns sometimes being preferable to troubled cities and dusty ways.  We look around us and know that the “world’s wheel is broken”, and in that brokenness something “starry and strange” is on the loose.   And all of a sudden starry, strange, wrath, wonder, and boundless spaces seem just as wont to be got away from as those  troubled cities and dusty ways with their frets and fevers.

And so we’re trapped.  Standing on the beach between dusty troubles and boundless spaces.

The thing is, you stand on a beach long enough, along with hearing the whispers of creation and the music of mighty waters, you’ll see a sunset that will arrest the remaining senses.

My prayer is that for those of us trapped on that beach, we won’t return to the cities or launch into the unknown without first hearing the music and seeing the majesty of the Creator God.   Additionally, don’t be surprised if when that happens, you see someone walking on the waves toward you.  Someone who extends their hand if you have the faith to take it.

“But the boat was already a long distance from the land, battered and tormented by the waves; for the wind was adverse and contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus came to them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear.  But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying,“Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.” ~ from Matthew’s gospel

Most of us pass through life in a state of semi-anesthesia, with life itself blotted out by the business of living. We shut out life itself in order to carry on and survive, and the function of the arts is to pierce that shield and make us suddenly reexperience something that we’ve always known but haven’t been experiencing anymore.

“A planet doesn’t explode of itself,” said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air -
“That they were able to do it is proof that highly
intelligent beings must have been living there.”

-John Hall Wheelock

Borrowed from Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle

Night Thoughts in Age

Light, that out of the west looked back once more
Through lids of cloud, has closed a sleepy eye;
The heaven of stars bends over me its silence,
A harp through which the wind of time still whispers
Music some hand has hushed but left there trembling–
Conceits of an aging man who lies awake
Under familiar rafters, in this leafy
Bird-singing, haunted, green ancestral spot
Where time has made such music! For often now,
In this belovèd country whose coastal shores
Look seaward, without limit, to the south–
Land of flung spume and spray, sea-winds and -voices
Where the gull rides the gale on equal wing,
With motionless body and forward-looking head,
Where, in mid-summer days, offshore, the dolphin
Hurdles the water with arching leap and plunge–
I meditate, lying awake, alone,
On the sea’s voice and time’s receding music,
Felt ebbing in the heart and shrunken vein–
How time, that takes us all, will at the last,
In taking us, take the whole world we are dreaming:
Sun, wind and sea, whisper of rain at night,
The young, hollow-cheeked moon, the clouds of evening
Drifting in a great solitude–all these
Shall time take away, surely, and the face
From which the eyes of love look out at us
In this brief world, this horror-haunted kingdom
Of beauty and of longing and of terror,
Of phantoms and illusion, of appearance
And disappearance–magic of leger-de-main,
Trick of the prestidigitator’s wand–
The huge phantasmagoria we are dreaming:
This shall time take from us, and take forever,
When we are taken by that receding music.
O marvel of things, fabulous dream, too soon,
Too soon will the wild blood cry out and death
Quell, with one blow, the inscrutable fantasy!
Shall prayer change this? Youth is the hour for prayer,
That has so much to pray for; a man’s life,
Lived howsoever, is a long reconcilement
To the high, lonely, unforgiving truth,
Which will not change for his or any prayer,
Now or hereafter: in that reconcilement
Lies all of wisdom. Age is the hour for praise,
Praise that is joy, praise that is acquiescence,
Praise that is adoration and gratitude
For all that has been given and not been given.
Night flows on. The wind, that all night through
Quickened the treetops with a breath of ocean,
Veers inland, falls away, and the sea’s voice,
Learned in lost childhood, a remembered music,
By day or night, through love, through sleep, through dream,
Still breathing its perpetual benediction,
Has dwindled to a sigh. By the west window,
In the soft dark the leaves of the sycamore
Stir gently, rustle, and are still, are listening
To a silence that is music. The old house
Is full of ghosts, dear ghosts on stair and landing,
Ghosts in chamber and hall; garden and walk
Are marvellous with ghosts, where so much love
Dwelt for a little while and made such music,
Before it too was taken by the tide
That takes us all, of time’s receding music.
Oh, all is music! All has been turned to music!
All that is vanished has been turned to music!
And these familiar rafters, that have known
The child, the young man and the man, now shelter
The aging man, who lies here, listening, listening–
All night, in a half dream, I have lain here listening.

–copyright (c) John Hall Wheelock, included in This Blessed Earth, New and Selected Poems,1927-1977, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever...

Anyway, here’s Wheelock’s poem:

Aphrodite, 1906

Dark-eyed, out of the snow-cold sea you came,
The young blood under the cheek like dawn-light showing,
Stray tendrils of dark hair in the sea-wind blowing,
Comely and grave, out of the sea you came.

Slim covered thigh and slender stockinged foot
In swift strides over the burnished shingle swinging,
Sweet silence of your smile, soft sea-weed clinging,
Here and there, to the wet bathing-suit.

O fierce and shy, your glance so piercing-true
Shot fire to the struck heart that was as tinder–
The fire of your still loveliness, the tender
High fortitude of the spirit shining through.

And the world was young. O love and song and fame
Were part of youth’s still ever believed-in story,
And hope crowned all, when in dear and in queenly glory,
Out of the snow-cold sea to me you came.

–copyright (c) John Hall Wheelock, 1973 –included in This Blessed Earth, New and Selected Poems,1927-1977, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons

It also makes me think of the Spencer Tracey character in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” where his future son in law’s mother asks him if he’s forgotten what it felt like to be in love.  And he surely remembers!

Anyway, I have no idea if he was married.  If I remember correctly, he was born not too long before 1900 and lived a bit past 1950.  Don’t quote me on either of those dates (rough as they are).  I imagine this as his memory, still clear later in life, of when he met someone as a young man who remained important to him (say, perhaps, his wife to be?).  It makes most sense to me that way.  Though I do recognize that it could be pure poetic imagination.