Exploring the nature of poetry through Keats and Simic

What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It?

This chapter questions the nature of poetry and the assumptions we make when reading it. These assumptions, often unrecognized, shape our understanding and appreciation of poetry. By becoming aware of these assumptions and comparing them with alternative perspectives, we can enhance and transform our reading experience.

Attempts to define poetry often involve distinguishing it from other literary genres (fiction and drama), ordinary language, and prose. These distinctions reveal shared assumptions about poetry among readers, particularly in Britain and North America during the twentieth century. However, poetry is multifaceted, encompassing diverse language practices and evolving characteristics throughout history. These changing assumptions influence both poets' practices and readers' interpretations, rendering the category of poetry unstable and potentially lacking a singular essential definition.

Common Conceptions of Poetry

Despite the challenges in defining poetry, many readers intuitively recognize a poem when they encounter one and share certain conceptions about what constitutes good poetry. To explore these conceptions, let's examine Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), a poem widely regarded as exemplary.

Ode to a Nightingale

(The poem is then presented in its entirety.)

Analysis of Keats's Ode

"Ode to a Nightingale" embodies several features that contribute to the feeling of authentic poetry. It employs poetic conventions based on particular assumptions about poetry, prompting us to consider whether these conventions influence our reading practices. Our assumptions about poetry shape our reading, and our reading influences which poems we consider exemplary. Thus, poetry is a product of both writing and reading practices.

Poetry As Expression - the Experience of Its Speaker?

Deep-rooted preconceptions associate poetry with profound personal emotion, nature, and imagination. Keats's "Ode" seems to confirm these preconceptions, depicting a poet listening to a nightingale and responding imaginatively to its song. However, the poem's poetic quality may stem from the profundity of the experience itself, the specific articulation of the experience, or the cultural association of nightingales with poetic value.

The poem's popularity may be attributed to the assumption that it provides direct access to the poet's inner experience. Many readers interpret the poem through Keats's biography, particularly his experience nursing his brother through tuberculosis, and his own untimely death from the same disease. This fusion of Keats's life and poetry highlights how our assumptions shape our reading. However, it's crucial to concentrate on reading the poetry rather than trying to recreate his thoughts and feelings.

"Ode to a Nightingale" invites us to read it as an intense expression of experience, driven by the speaker's attempt to merge his consciousness with the nightingale. The speaker desires wine to facilitate this union and escape the real world, described as a place of suffering. Abandoning wine, the speaker turns to poetry as a means of flying to the nightingale on the "viewless wings of Poesy". The speaker briefly feels transported to the nightingale's realm, considering it a perfect moment to die. However, the final stanza brings the speaker back to reality, realizing that the union with the nightingale was an illusion.

Poetry as a Response in the Reader?

The assumption that poetry expresses intense personal experience often entails a related assumption about the reader's role: to be moved by the poem. However, such responses can be superficial. More profound aesthetic pleasures arise from careful and sustained intellectual analysis.

Poetry and the World: The Poem as a Representation of Life?

Another approach involves assessing how accurately the poem represents the real world. While Keats's "Ode" is not a straightforward description of an action or object, it explores the idea of a nightingale and its significance for the speaker. Despite the poetic conventions, the poem touches on recognizable experiences: the recognition of sorrow and despair, and the desire to escape them. The poem suggests that our means of escape offer only temporary relief.

Reading for the Message

The poem offers an insight into the human condition, suggesting that nature, wine, poetry, love and beauty provide only transient respite from suffering. However, seeking a moral message in poetry can lead to banal conclusions.

Romantic Poetry

Many of the assumptions examined thus far—that poetry expresses the profound imaginative experience and moral insight of a creative genius—stem from ideas developed by Romantic writers. Romantic theory emphasizes that poetry is the direct product of the individual genius's special imaginative capacity. The quality of a poem reflects the poet's sensibility, and the quality of a reader's response measures his or her sensibility. However, these Romantic assumptions are not the only way to read poetry.

Literary theorists and critics have begun to resist and criticize Romantic readings. This book aims to introduce you to more recent assumptions about poetry, which may offer deeper insights into poetic texts.

Close Reading and the Language of Poetry

While Romantic readings focus on sincerity of feeling, emotional response, and profundity of insight, more recent approaches prioritize the close reading of the poetic text's language itself. Analyzing the interplay between language and form is a particularly rewarding way to read poetry. It is the emotional power of a text produced by exploiting language to its full capacity.

"Ode to a Nightingale" uses language to produce specific effects. Its language announces itself as 'poetic' through the employment of 'poetic diction' - words and phrases conventionally associated with poetry which includes second-person pronouns such as thou' andthy', of phrases like 'verdurous glooms', and allusions to classical mythology. Linguistic approaches to poetry include notions of 'heightened' language, 'literariness', and 'register'. The conventions of poetic language mark it as the register appropriate to poetry. These registers often change over time, producing poems that may appear archaic to modern readers.

Sound-patterning, such as rhyme and alliteration, is another feature of poetic language. In "Ode to a Nightingale", the sound of words contributes to and ultimately undoes the illusion created by the poem. The concentrated use of alliteration can be said to present an equivalent to the charm of the nightingale's song. The poem becomes tangled up in the material nature of language itself, and can no longer produce transcendental illusions. The poem explores the possibilities and pleasures of figurative language. The second stanza offers figurative terms for wine endowing wine with positive associations we have with nature. Through the use of highly 'poetic' language, the speaker is trying to seil the reader the idea that wine might offer a way out of the everyday suffering.

Close reading involves attending to the language of poetry which employs poetic conventions and techniques that exploit specific cultural connotations. This attention to the conventions of poetic language is one of the ways of discussing poetry which will be encouraged throughout this book. However, the fact that such techniques of 'close reading' are useful in analyzing other kinds of language as well as poetry indicates that the features they respond to cannot be defining features of poetry. All discourses employ figurative language, and the sound effects of alliteration, rhyme, and so on, can occur in any kind of language use (and they are not invariably present in poetry). This fact has led critics and theorists to attempt to distinguish poetic uses of such figurative and aural devices from their use in other kinds of discourse.

The Lineation of Poetry

The most evident distinction between poetry and prose lies in its arrangement on the page: poetry is divided into lines, while prose runs continuously. This division into lines is the basis of poetry and the origin of the poetic effect. Keats's poem is an example of metrical verse in that the length of each line fits into a regular template. The poem's metrical regularity Sets up a visual and aural framework or pattern within which all the other linguistic effects we have talked about take place. The highly regular pattern of lines in the 'Ode' does not produce a sense that the poem is rigidly structured. but a product of technique. Keats sets up a strict metrical template of equal line lengths, the structure of his sentences hardly ever coincides with the line structure, giving the language a sense of spontatneous energy.

Poetry and Meaning

While close attention to linguistic detail is valuable, it's also important to consider the larger meaning of a poem. Recent theories of literature emphasize that all meaning is historically and culturally specific rather than universal. Different readings, informed by different assumptions, can produce different versions of the same poem. However, all readings must be supported by close reference to the poem's language.

Approaching Keats's poem with the question "What is poetry?" allows us to see the "Ode" as a poem about poetry itself. Many of its images have associations with poetry. For example, wine, the speaker's initial avenue of escape, also evokes Provence's poet-musicians and the Hippocrene, a fountain associated with poetic inspiration. While the speaker initially identifies wine with poetry, he ultimately affirms the superiority of poetry itself.

By employing the wings of Poesy', the speaker will not only achieve poetic `flight' – or a flight of the imagination – but will thereby become like the nightingale. In this way, the poem emerges as a celebration or exploration of the power of poetry itself to help us escape a world of suffering. But the poetry being tested here is not poetry in general but a specifically Romantic kind of poetry.

The imagination, a key term for Romantic poetry, enables the speaker to achieve a sympathetic oneness with the nightingale. However, just as wine is rejected in favour of poetry, so poetry itself is found wanting at the end of the poem by failing to fulfil its promise.

The imaginative and wonderful sense of flight is revealed at the end as a kind of cheat whose limitation is either that it is not true or lasting or that it does not cheat effectively enough. The speaker's attempt to use the poetic imagination as a means of overcoming the difference between self and other fails, and the nightingale's `plaintive anthem' vanishes into 'the next valley-glades'.

The Poet's Intention

An important question arises: Is the purpose of reading poetry to discover the poet's intention in writing it? Eliot's insistence that criticism should be directed upon the poem rather than the poet led the so-called New Critics to claim that a poem should be read on its own terms rather than in terms of its author's statements about his or her intentions when writing it. There are pro blems with the notion of authorial intention including the problem of access, lack of constraint and the issue that unintended meanings are often as interesting as intended meanings. Moreover, we often ask why the author's intentions should be privileged over what the text itself seems to say, or what careful readers discover it to be saying.

The ways of reading poems presented in this book will rarely worry about or make claims for the author's intentions. This is not to say that an author's intentions are irrelevant or uninteresting – they are not – but that we can never be certain what those intentions were, and that in any case such intentions are not the final arbiter of a poem's meaning.

And Now for Something Completely Different

To test the claim that Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" represents most readers' idea about what poetry is, let's compare Keats's poem with the poem below, published in 1974 by Charles Simic:

The Garden of Earthly Delights

(The Charles Simic poem is presented)

This comparison will allow us to become more aware of those features of Keats's poem which make it sound and look more like 'real' poetry. Our method here will be, once more, to look closely at the poem's language to see how it achieves its effects. In terms of poetic form, Keats's poem looks and Sounds poetic through his use of formal features such as metre and rhyme, whereas Simic's reads more like a list of comments which have no relation to the fact that it is divided into lines.

Our received ideas about poetry suggest that flowers and birds are inherently more poetic subjects than bathroom scales or tax problems. A further difference between the poems is in the different images we are given of the poetic speakers. Whereas Keats's speaker displays a 'poetic' sensibility (this is one of the main points of the poem), Simic's seems quite the reverse. The impression that Keats's diction is more 'poetic' than Simic's is also produced by the former's use of cultural allusions (references to the myths and literature of earlier periods or cultures). This comparison has revealed some of the features of what we usually think of as `traditional' poetry, but it also indicates that there are radically different kinds of poetry.

Simic's poem seems more like a list of mundane observations about everyday urban life in the USA in the Tate twentieth century. The poem therefore raises interesting points in a discussion of what poetry is, since it plays upon our expectations about poetry. The effect of encountering such 'ordinary' language in a poem is because we are expecting something else – probably something like Keats. Part of the poem's impact depends on its relationship to other poems but also on its internal tension.

The use of mundane language acts as a setting against which sudden glimpses of more 'poetic' language seem all the more startling. The effect here depends precisely upon the clash between sacred and profane language – without this, the effect of either would be diluted.

Simic's title alludes to a triptych of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch called 'Garden of Terrestrial Delights' (c.1510). Simic's allusion to this painting invites us to look for parallels between poem and painting. Is Simic suggesting that the mundane chaos of modern life is like Bosch's vision of hell? Have we, then, unexpectedly arrived at the possibility that Keats's and Simic's poems are radically different versions of the same theme? Is Simic's speaker also seeking a way out of a world in which we `sit and hear each other groan'?

Within the list of mundane observations which makes up the first part of the poem, there is an unexpected claim about the nature of poetry: 'Roger says / poetry is the manufacture of lightning rods' (5-6). The Statement is quite surprising, since we are being invited to think of poetry as a manufacturing process. One way of interweting this metaphor is to think about the function of lightning rods: to conduct electrical energy from storms to the earth. The metaphor might therefore be claiming that poetry creates some kind of medium which conducts energy from the 'heavens' to the earth

Readers' Assumptions and the Reading Experience

Our readings of Keats's and Simic's poems have demonstrated that we do not approach any poem as 'innocent readers free from preconceptions about poetry. Our response to and understanding of Simic's poem partly depend on our knowledge of poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale". Our original question – 'What is poetry?' – is not an irrelevant question even though we may not be able definitively to answer it. Most of the features we have identified as being authentically 'poetic' in Keats's poem are actually characteristic of Romantic poetry rather than poetry in general. This fact reveals the way in which our assumptions are shaped by the history of culture.

Periods prior to the Romantic period had very different ideas about poetry, ideas which shaped the ways in which poetry was written, read and valued. We should be wary of thinking that the continued existence of Romantic ideas about poetry means that they are more correct or better than other ideas. Why is it, for example, that we continue to have and value Romantic conceptions about poetry more than 150 years after the official' end of the Romantic-period? The same assumptions underlie the way poetry is discussed on television, in book reviews in newspapers and magazines, and in popular films such as Dead Poets Society. This is one of the reasons why we continue to regard Keats's "Ode" (written nearly two hundred years ago) as an exemplary poem.

The fact that different theories about poetry have been held at different historical moments indicates why it is impossible to give a definitive answer to the question 'What is poetry?'. All answers to that question will inevitably be historically and theoretically contingent.

Literary Theory and the Reader's Position

The idea that we cannot step outside history or theory is a relatively recent one. Its consequence is that many literary critics have become quite self-conscious about their own `position' as readers in relation to a text. Since New Criticism lost its dominant place in the study of literature in universities, no single literary theory has taken its place. Instead, literature departments teach a range of theories, including Russian Formalism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, Reader Response, and New Historicism. Rather than teaching any particuar litterary theory, this book wants to stimulate you to think about poetry in theoretically informed ways which will allow you to be attentive to the theoretical implications of the features of each particular poem you read.