What Makes a Poem a Poem? 

 

It’s my custom to ask students on the first day of a poetry course to write down the questions they have about poetry. Whatever the ages of the students, the identical questions always come up: the following examples (directly quoted) are typical. I’ve grouped them into two sets:

 

Set 1: What makes a poem a poem? / How can you read poems so they make sense? / What are you supposed to be looking for in poems? / How can I tell where to pause? / How do you know when you've read a poem right? / How can I know when to stop analysing, not to take it too far? / Is it possible to have a number of different interpretations of a single poem?

 

Set 2: Why is poetry so hard to understand? / Why do writers disguise the meaning of a poem in complicated words and structure? / Are poems always written with hidden meanings? / Why do people write poems (metaphors) instead of expressing their ideas and feelings straight out? / If the author doesn't leave any explanations of his poems, how is a definitive interpretation determined?

 

Intensity

 

It makes no sense, of course, to think that poets would deliberately make their poems obscure or convoluted, as though to frustrate or humiliate readers. Rather, any competent poet would be gratified to have his or her work understood and appreciated. If a poem seems enigmatic, especially at first reading, it’s because, in the words of Northrop Frye, poetry is "language used with the greatest possible intensity." [1] Intensity in poetry is a profound aesthetic energy. Wishing that poems were less intense is like wishing that musicians or athletes would dampen their intensity; we would lose the thing we most value in their performances. Frye goes on to say: “Reading poetry is a technique of meditation: we must keep reading and rereading the same poem for quite a while before its real intensity will emerge.” [2] One basis of the intensity in poems is the fact that what is said in a poem and how it’s said are not two different things. Thus, reading involves being conscious of the details of language: of words, including their sounds and the ways they relate to the other words in the poem, and to the rhythms of lines and sentences. For people who are used to reading swiftly for content (the eye scans the text, the meaning appears in the mind), such attention may seem like unnecessary trouble. But sound and rhythm are immediate sources of the pleasure of reading poems. And the pleasure isn't something new; rather, it’s a reawakening of the enjoyment we had as pre-literate children in moving to rhythms and in the mysterious power of words.

           

A question like “What is a poem?” or “What makes a poem a poem?” can’t be answered directly: my best indirect answer is contained in the readings of the poems in Part II. But a couple of observations can be useful in starting out.

 

The Most Intimate Art Form

 

We spend our lives aware of ourselves and of our existence in the world into which we are born and from which we know we must die. This awareness manifests itself in the form of an internal voice that we take to be the thinking self, perpetually desiring, observing, and questioning. Poetry can be thought of as the artistic shaping of this voice. However distant in time or space, however conditioned by evolving language or poetic conventions, poems enable us to access what Helen Vendler has called this "inner life” of the mind, which is “engaged in a reflective look at its own processes of thought and feeling.” [3] No art form is as intimate as poetry.

Argument

As we know, narratives are shaped by being organised around plots, or story-lines. The shaping element of a poem analogous to the plot of a narrative is its argument. The term has nothing to do with quarrelling: the argument is the “thought-line” of a poem, where the thought starts out, how it moves and where it ends up.

           

The arguments of poems have an essential characteristic in common with the arguments of another literary form not usually associated with poems: the joke. I’m willing to admit that poems tend to be more serious and profound than jokes, but in both cases language is used to build up self-contained structures. To work properly, these structures need to be complete, with nothing missing and nothing misplaced; in other words, they must be "told right." The listeners or readers for their part have to “get” them. What occurs is a flash of insight---the light bulb goes on, and one grasps the joke or poem as a whole. That's why we don't need to ask a poet for an explanation of a poem, any more than we need to contact the author of a joke. Most poems don’t have punch lines, of course, at least not in the way jokes do, but the intensity of a poem is the equivalent of the “punch” of a joke.

 

Making Sense

 

There’s the well-known fact that poems are written in lines, which don’t usually go all the way across the page. In most poems, the lines contain sentences, and to understand a poem we need to follow the sentences accurately and in sequence, just as we would in any kind of writing. A sentence can be one line in length or less than a line, or it can extend over several lines: any arrangement is possible. And if the lines are arranged in the uniform groupings called stanzas, sentences may "jump" across the spaces between stanzas. All this may be almost too obvious to mention, but inexperienced readers sometimes assume that every line is a unit of meaning that must be interpreted by itself (a possible source of confusion may come from the fact that in many poems each line begins with a capital letter). Of course, as soon as we see the sentences in the lines, the problem disappears, and we can begin to feel the interplay between the two.

 

Reading at Leisure

We feel dull if we don’t get a joke immediately, but, as already noted, the flash of insight into a poem is unlikely to arrive quickly. So reading a poem is ideally an activity of leisure. If we were students starting to study a poem the night before an essay was due...well, it’s often our experiences as students that cure us of reading poems later on. But if we’re reading for pleasure, we can take our time, reading and rereading, following the sentences to see how the argument goes, looking up words that we don’t know or that seem unusual in the context of the poem, mulling the poem over when it comes to mind, picking it up again—in effect, giving the insight the chance to come across. During this incubation it’s not necessary to try to interpret, only to follow the movement of the sentences, so that, however obscure a poem might seem, it becomes familiar even in its obscurity.

Such reading allows the unconscious—one might prefer to say the intuitive—functioning of our minds to work on the poem. The unconscious is where a poem develops its intensity in the poet and where it’s intuited by readers. It's as though the conscious mind has only to keep out of the way, to let the unconscious do its work.  If one is conditioned to believe that thinking is, or should be, entirely conscious and logical, the concept of unconscious thinking may seem fanciful or perverse. But it's the way all creative thought works, in the sciences as well as in the arts. It operates as well in daily life; it's what causes a problem to resolve itself after we’ve spent enough time thinking about it, often after we’ve “slept on it.” [4]

One of the questions on the minds of beginners is, “How can I know when to stop analysing, not to take it too far?” If one is reading accurately, there comes that moment when the poem "arrives"—when it lights up. One can rest there in enjoyment, though as one continues to revisit a poem, it can continue to expand in one’s mind with greater power and resonance.