re: In Your Own Words, How Do You Define Poetry? page 4

Could not ride a horse? What kind of literary world is that? Even Fanny Price can ride a horse!

Seriously, I think "sedentary types" appear when our society becomes more "specialized", so now we have people who do nothing but teach writing and write...and people who get MFA degrees in writing...

And people who teach how to teach writing...

Poetry is a tool used to help people understand and appreciate certain aspects of life. It is an art and profession, which involves diction and images. Also it can be defined as the capture of various sentiments which are translated into writing.

everything you feel, you experience, happening in your heart, that you honestly try to express on a letter no matter the form of the sentence.

if there is a rule to name your work a poem, then you can think about it later...

I see poetry as a time to express how you feel and how you really talk and express yourself.

T.S. Eliot has some interesting comments on self-expression and poetry (among other things)in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.

e.g.

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

"...the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations."

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

I don't know whether he's right or not. But it's true that while self-expression may be very enjoyable for the writer, it's often very tedious for the reader.

MrP

MrPedanticI don't know whether he's right or not. But it's true that while self-expression may be very enjoyable for the writer, it's often very tedious for the reader.

This is where the talent factor comes into play. I believe that all poetry is self expression and that a lot of poetry is self-indulgent and that when a poet can rise above the self and indulge the else we have art.

Robert

Some poets seem to express nothing of themselves, though...those who wrote the poems we assign to Homer, for instance, or the Border Ballads; or the poet who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight.

Then too, there are poets such as Racine and Gautier and Leconte de Lisle who deliberately eschew self-expression. And some deliberately adopt different personae for different poems (Browning, Laforgue, Pound).

Or take Spenser: the character of the narrator of The Faerie Queene is quite different from the character of the narrator of his writings on Ireland.

MrP

G'day MrP,

You are far more well read than am I and I generally try to avoid an overindulgence in poetry but I will go out on a limb and state that all writing is autobiographical and all writing reveals the writer to the reader.

Robert