Saturday, January 10, 2009

A Preface to Paradise Lost: Poetry

I'm reluctant to say I have written poetry.

At best I could say I've attempted free verse...but I'm not sure I'm qualified. That is, I'm not against using strict meter or rhyme the way Wikipedia cites one of the earliest references to the term in 1915:
"We do not insist upon 'free-verse' as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty."
"Liberty"?

Apparently T.S. Eliot said of free verse:"No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." However, Robert Frost remarked that writing free verse was like "playing tennis without a net".

That's it! That's me!

I'm not rebellious. I'm just lazy.

Still when I want to communicate an idea (typically an extended caption to a photo I want to post on my blog), I don't want readers to have to spend a lot of time & effort to "decipher the ambiguities". I want the reader to be able to quickly get the idea without straining.

Anyway, Lewis is instructive on this topic, too, in A Preface to Paradise Lost (pp 2-3; Epic Poetry):

Every poem can be considered in two ways: as what the poet has to say and as a thing which he makes.

From the one point of view it is the expression of opinions & emotions; from the other it is an organization of words which exist to produce a particular kind of patterned experience in the reader.

Another way of stating this duality would be to say that every poem has two parents-its mother being the mass of experience, thought and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form (epic, tragedy, the novel, or what not) which he meets in the public world...It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only to be enamored of a woman, but also to be enamored of the Sonnet

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