About Poetry

In today’s literary world there are many collections of words that are called poetry. What is your definition of poetry?
Po-it-tree or, as we know the word poetry. I like to think of a poem as a tree that has roots in the mind of the poet, a living tree of thoughts that grow.
Trees can be found in their natural state, growing, pollinating, propagating, doing what they are meant to do, create oxygen for the world to use. A forest of trees makes the individual tree very hard to appreciate, however, if you take an individual tree from the forest and plant it in an open space, its beauty can be appreciated, its limbs that have fought for space in the forest and reached for the light above will spread, the roots will expand and it will produce a greater amount of oxygen than it was capable of confined in the forest of trees.
A poem is a literary tree, a thought planted in the mind of the poet that has roots. To communicate with the world and be of any value those roots must reach out of their confinement into the world as words, those words form the trunk of the tree, the arrangement of those words form the shape of the poem the balance of the branches will either make the poem memorable or let it be just another poem like any other poem. A good poem is memorable for the thought that it conveys and for the rhythms of its words.

Here is a poem that changed poetry and brought it into the modern world as an art form of the masses.


AS I ponder’d in silence,  
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,  
A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect,  
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,  
The genius of poets of old lands,          5
As to me directing like flame its eyes,  
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,  
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said;  
Know’st thou not, there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?  
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,   10
The making of perfect soldiers?  
  
2

Be it so, then I answer’d,  
I too, haughty Shade, also sing war—and a longer and greater one than any,  
Waged in my book with varying fortune—with flight, advance, and retreat—Victory defer’d and wavering,  
(Yet, methinks, certain, or as good as certain, at the last,)—The field the world;   15
For life and death—for the Body, and for the eternal Soul,  
Lo! too am come, chanting the chant of battles,  
I, above all, promote brave soldiers.  


You no doubt have all read this poem in your college literature course. Here is another poem by the same poet.


O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;  
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;  
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,  
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:  
    But O heart! heart! heart!          5
      O the bleeding drops of red,  
        Where on the deck my Captain lies,  
          Fallen cold and dead.  
  
2

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;  
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;   10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;  
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;  
    Here Captain! dear father!  
      This arm beneath your head;  
        It is some dream that on the deck,   15
          You’ve fallen cold and dead.  
  
3


Walt Whitman, wrote both these poems, The first from his Leaves of Grass Collection, the second his eulogy to Lincoln. Whitman, brought poetry to a level that the general masses could understand and mimic its construction. He introduced free verse with rhythm. Everyone in the literary world became poets. I don’t argue with that assumption. It is good to read the thoughts of our fellow citizens of the world. It is good that they are writing and sharing their thoughts. Unfortunately this proliferation of free verse with irregular meter and rhythms is not memorable as more than the transitory thought projected with questionable rhythm. Whereas a poem like Lincoln’s eulogy O! Captain My Captain, is long remembered and often repeated in context
I leave you with this questions: If a poem is “so deep” it cannot be understood or remembered, what good is it?

by Tom Spencer March 9, 2010