Poetry Week Day Three: What is Poetry For?

If you’re going to write poetry, you must learn what it is and what it hopes to achieve. We’ve covered the first category in quite a lot of depth, so today we’re asking, “What is poetry for?”

The greatest poems make us feel. They enlighten the reader or make him see something in a new way. Given that we’ve been writing poetry for 4,000 years, adding something new to a universal theme is far from easy, but unless we can dig beneath the skin, we will never reach another human.

Love poems are the bread and butter of the poetry world. Few things are as universal as love, or as mystical. The genre is, frankly, becoming older and more frayed every time someone writes a love song, so to write a love poem, you must find something visceral that’s never been said before. You must find the layers beneath the layers. You must seek out a new kind of truth. Aed Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats is one of the most famous love poems in history. It goes like this:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

It's easy to see why it’s been celebrated for over a century. If we reduced it to its meaning, we might say, “Love is dangerous and I have little to give. Be careful of my heart” </Tracy Chapman>. But it makes you feel that theme profoundly. My heart hurts just reading it because Yeats has found a way to describe the experience visually and viscerally.

You can’t do that unless your poem is deeply felt. T.S. Eliot said poets must become amateur psychologists, capable of penetrating the surface of the human experience in all its complexity. If your poem is shallowly felt, it will be shallowly read. Cleverness is a poor substitute for profound observation.

Yeats’ poem also sketches out a stark, coloured image to give his love and fear a perfectly lit palette. Imagery and rhythm always help, but shallow poems are as useless as dreams. The truth is all you have, so use it.

Exercise

Write an original poem about a universal theme. That theme can be love, death, suffering, religion... anything that we all experience as humans.