“Poetry is feeling, the
expression of feeling, and the exploration and discipline of feeling.”
—Robert Wallace
I’m trying to see how this quote by Robert Wallace explains
Wordsworth’s Criterion for poetry. I’m trying for that and I assume it’s pretty
much going to come out highly opinionated. I guess I can live with that, after
all.
Poetry is Feeling
Let’s take this feeling and
modify it as a verb. Imagine yourself in a dark room where you are deprived of
the sense of sight and are made to depend entirely on your alternate senses.
This is important on two levels. First, your other senses because
you are blinded, assume heightened consciousness. The senses of touch, smell,
taste, of sound are emphasized; you start feeling
your way through the shadows. On another hand, there’s the opportunity—let’s
imagine you are in familiar setting—to reacquaint yourself with the objects you
come in contact with in that darkness. When you come in contact with an object,
your fingers register the touch and send a message to your mind which,
consequently, builds a resourceful table of vocabularies to describe it or redescribe it. You gain or develop a new
understanding of things once known; the upshot stands out like a silhouette.
Poetry works that kind of magic. It makes you see stuff—even clichés—in a
different light.
Poetry is the Expression of Feeling
Well, this looks easy enough. If you can visualize a processing
machine—the kind where you input data or hardware and it coughs out a totally
different matter maybe, you have an idea what this is about. Poetry gives voice
to your feelings or rather is the voice of your feelings. Let’s say your
emotion is the earth without form and verse is the creative force that lends it
the beauty of art. Poetry can do that much for feeling when we use it to
channel deep-seated passion.
Poetry adds radiance to fogged-up emotion when it untangles and
stretches it out into metric quantities. It modifies feeling, in other words.
Poetry is the Exploration of Feeling
The picture of the early explorers appeals fiercely to the imagination.
Those old-time pioneer new world discoverers
with their seafaring crew on their heels sailing deep into the sea, burrowing far
into places—villages, towns, kingdoms and countries—yet unknown to the ancient western
world . . . As far as the emotions go, poetry can take the poet and the reader on
a journey packed full of equivalent measure of heat and adventure. It can jaunt
the soul through little-known passageways within the human heart, regions alien
to detection or previously unexplored. Poetry conducts depth rich in meaning
into words and in this manner it illustrates the endearing feat only this form
of art can quite achieve.
Poetry is the Discipline of Feeling
In other words, it keeps a tight rein over your emotions. Here’s a
practical example of how this works from the life of a legend, Ray Charles.
“She’d say, (referring to his
mother) ‘Now look, I want you to learn
how to get around by yourself without seeing. And the way we are going to do
this is, I’m going to place some chairs in certain areas of this room. And I want
you to learn how to navigate these chairs. I want you to learn how, when you go
into a place, to observe what it’s like.’
“No dog and no cane. You know I’m
going to walk into things, but it taught me to remember where things were.”
—Ray Charles,
Jazz Superstar
Poetry helps you master your emotions, but I think coordinate is a more appropriate phrase.
Somebody might wonder, do I need to know these much about how poetry relates
with the human emotion before I can write poetry? Well, not really. But it’s
good to know there is more than one way poetry deals with our true selves and
that’s exactly what I’ve tried to illustrate.
Keep your pens bleeding!
Akpan
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