Introduction
I am a PhD student at The University of Birmingham interested in the features and functions of Early Modern forms, and especially those of poetry. My research focuses on the work of Thomas Traherne and four contemporary writers of the late seventeenth century. However, in this blog I hope to explore the many forms, uses, occasions, functions, and emotional states ascribed to poetry with the aim of asking: what do poems do for us, and why do we write them?
23/01/2020: Where is the emotion in poetry?
This is a question to which I have returned to throughout my studies. Moreover, it is a question which so many people feel qualified to answer without much thought. ‘Poetry is a form of expression’ they say. ‘Poetry is a heightened form of writing or language’ they add. Others use poetry to ‘ease’ emotion, to ‘come to terms’, or to gain ‘solace’ in other’s feelings and expression. Is the emotion in the reader or in the writer? Is the poem itself the emotion? I recently read a comment on an academic twitter feed that pointed to the conflation of poetry and emotion in Farsi – the word is one and the same. For my own part, my original attraction to seventeenth century devotional poets was to the intensity of love, self-sacrifice, and longing in these poems – it is no surprise that they are called ‘devotional’. God, the ultimate object of devotion, in all his and her many guises is beguiling and coquettish. But do I feel the same emotions as the writer? Is that emotion recoverable? Is the writer toying with me? This touches on the authorial persona: John Donne was probably not the swarthy ‘Casanova’ his poetry suggests; the coterie system of writing enabled witty, intellectuals like Donne to network, and to demonstrate their employability; Sidney and his contemporaries wrote exhaustive love poems to curry favour with the Virgin Queen, or to protest against her Tudor temper; Marvell and Herrick probably died virgins despite their seeming gynacological knowledge of female anatomy. Their poetry is emotional, but their intentions were more rational. My copy of the Princeton Encyclopaedia of all things poetry is equivocal on the matter, but it does strongly advise all students to avoid issues of emotion. It cannot be measured or observed, and for very many of us describing our feelings is a livelong struggle. And yet, emotion rears its head in my research, and all around me poetry collides with emotion.
As a reader and writer of poetry I am no less subject to this madness. I write poetry to my boyfriend to ‘express’ my feelings to him, and to show him how I perceive him (he really is incredible even if he doesn’t always agree). Description, imagery, and metaphor make it far easier to express the intangible ‘fizz’ of feeling. But I, and we, also write funny, silly, often extempore rhymes and ditties to each other via WhatsApp or in conversation; there is an emotion in these verses. The emotion is located in the relationship between the two of us, in the fun and happiness we share. I write poems for my mother most birthdays to make her feel loved and special; I take a famous poem from history and personalise it to her. Am I channelling an historic emotion or creating a new one? I read poems for fun, for study, for comfort, and all manner of reasons. Is the satisfaction of having quenched my curiosity an emotional state? What about the feeling of quiet imperiousness at having ‘understood’ a poem, or better yet sharing that understanding: that warm feeling at having helped a student? When my boyfriend moved away to work, Coleridge’s ‘Lime-tree Bower’ helped me come to terms with the distance. I was particularly struck by the image of the rook flying from the lime tree and ‘o’er thy head’. This was not least because of a lime tree at the university under which we enjoyed an afternoon, and in which a pair of crows had a nest. But this only complicates the matter: is the emotion in the poem, in me, in the tree, or in me looking at the tree and being reminded of the whole affair? When my grandmother passed away Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ aka ‘Milton a Poem’, her favourite anthem, became more poignant, and I found myself signing it to myself in quiet moments (I still feel tears when I think about it). At her funeral the congregation and I were suddenly incapable of singing it – though her the social occasion had a mass effect on proceedings . That anthemic mode of poetry opens up another aspect of poetry as a means of instilling group emotion and identity: my school song was ‘World in Union’ by Charlie Sharbek based on Holst’s ‘Jupiter’. Such was the collective feeling of belonging and compassion that any student removed from Friday assembly, and therefore excluded from singing, felt like a pariah. I never forgave Ms. Giller for wrongly accusing me of talking during assembly. My own relationship with poetry and emotion is not one thing.
Poetry is the spur to emotion, the expression or interpretation of emotion, a vessel to communicate emotion, a shared activity producing joy and affection, a reinterpretation of emotion, a means to affect emotion in another, a memory of emotion, and – in dark moments, an overwhelming embodiment of emotion. I will caveat this, with the early moderns I mention in mind, with the possible exception of the riddles I share with my boyfriend, none of these emotional experiences coincidences with the production of the poem. The Princeton points to this too: it suggests that in actuality writing a poem requires almost an absence of emotion or intense self control to facilitate ordering and manipulating language into form. I would find it hard (believe me) to express my love whilst feeling it so intensely. And whilst they may have had emotional states in mind, neither Coleridge or Blake could have anticipated my unique response to their writing. To return to some of my questions above, I do not deny that poetry can affect, contain, express, and otherwise be connected with emotions. But this connection is not fixed. It can change over time. It is not wholly predicable. It is not universal. It is contextual and contingent culturally, historically, socially, occasionally, and personally. It is, as are so many forms of human communication, unreliable. I don’t buy into the Farsi idea of poems as emotions. And let’s not forget that many poems have a primary function beyond emotion: I learnt countless rhymes at primary school meant to discourage littering or instruct in shoe tying. But certainly they function as vehicles or vessels of emotion in a way that speaks to us on a fundamental level – they use our language.
11/02/2020 Why write poetry?
Following on from my discussion above regarding the location of emotion in poetry, here I’d like to interrogate the many reasons one might write a poem. However, I will stick with the topic of emotion in poetry in order to narrow the focus, and to add to this discussion. When one feels an emotion, whatever this may be and to whatever extent, why might one be inclined to write it into poetry?
The obvious answer is as expression: to show love to a loved one, grief at a loss, joy at a new beginning, or fear in the face of adversity. Equally someone else can then read this poem in search of solace, resolution, or recognition of a related emotion – or of the lover’s affections. This is no longer expression but now communication, sharing, communion, bringing two emotional beings together through art. There are countless books and newspaper columns that conform to this somewhat prescriptive view of poetry as a panacea for the heart. The ‘ode’ is very much traveled; it is a unit of feeling which can be accessed almost universally. But this detracts from the original intention of the writer feverishly recording the notes of his heart. And what about the reader: is her experience of love identical. Let’s give them both more credit.
An answer I come across in my own research from time to time is that writing allows the poet to unlock thoughts, to understand an issue, to come to terms with feelings. I’ve no doubt this happens. All writing is on some level reflective. It is an extension of our thoughts into the real world. In my own writing, prose or poetry, I often spend long periods tussling over word choices, syntax, and tense. Each variation gives a new shade of meaning to my thoughts, and often inspires another line of thinking. I return to my readings with renewed questions. But rarely does this break out into a poem. If it does, that poem is frequently abandoned once the issue at hand is resolved. There may be the bare bones of a stanza, and even the beginnings of metrical patterns (It’s surprising how easy it is to think in iambic pentameter when you are surrounded by it, and equally, tetrameter when one’s object of study changes style). This is writing poetry to inform other writing or thinking. It is a stepping stone to something else, but not a finished product in itself. In all those archives of poetic juvenalia around the world, there must be a considerable about of writing which was never meant to be read.
To return to the question at hand, is Katherine Austen coming to terms with depression when she writes ‘What makes me Melancholy, what black cloud?’ (You’ll have to believe me on this one; Austen is rare in publication). Well, yes, she follows a meditational structure, and reaches a conclusion which she takes to heart. But did she do so in the moment of writing? Is it possible to experience heightened emotions whilst writing extempore? Doubtful. Most of us struggle to write extempore when we’re in the focused conditions of an exam. But, as a practice following the initial experience and its conclusion, writing a poem as a second perspective on the whole is useful – much like many of us write journals or blogs. But then, why poetry, why go to that trouble?
Here we come to conceit. Are some people inclined to write poetry simply because they can, because they want to , or because they want to impress someone? This could of course be said of all acts of writing. But to drill into poetry, is there some perceived added value of converting ones feelings into poetry? Is this why so many of us will this weekend hand over handwritten love poems to our Valentines? Or, hand over a shop bought card which expresses our desires in verse? I too ‘buy’ into this. My beloved will be receiving a hand bound manuscript containing twenty-four variations on the theme of ‘Roses are Red/Violets are Blue’. Sickening. Don’t go thinking twenty-four was my target, and, once achieved, I put down my pen. Over a period of months I accumulated some fifty or sixty scribbled variations from which I curated a collection which best expresses my feelings about our relationship. This is not therefore an act simply of impressing my amore, but one of extended contemplation and evaluation put into words – and a very limited palette of words at that (during my masters I read all of Sidney’s, Mary Wroth’s, Shakespeare’s, and Petrarch’s sonnets – in conclusion they were all mad, and each of stuck to limited ways of saying ‘I’m happy’, or mostly ‘I’m sad, but I love you. Darkness and light was the most frequent metaphor). So, there is a social value in poetry that some are willing to pay for; but I am sure even the most jaded consumer compares at least a couple of Valentines cards before purchase. Whether bought or self-originated, in both the ‘poetry’ allows for some reflection on the relationship by both the giver and the receiver.
I wish to deviate slightly. I recently wrote a poem completely out of the blue. That is to say, whilst R. and I were playing with language as we often do, I went the extra step and played into a poem. Thus, what was a silly exchange of rhyming words and phrases which began out of nowhere coalesced into a brief poem on my feelings for him. There was no intention to write – beyond the game. There was no urge to express – beyond the intangible expression of affection in the game itself (these games are our little ‘in’). There was no desire to impress. It was just a couple being silly. But out of it came a poem which expresses what: a hidden truth? an absurdity? ingenuity? Perhaps a mixture of all three. I was certainly surprised and impressed with my sudden ability to string a few rhymes into a quatrain. But I can’t take full credit for this poem. This was a poem created by an occasion, and by a relationship. It is symbiotic. As an expression, it is an expression of that relationship. A transaction no less, but quite apart from the transaction of writer and reader.
But what of this limited palette, and so many writers going there before. Is writing about ones feelings not so much an act of sharing and expressing, but an act of communion? Joining in with a time honoured tradition? Speaking the language of our forebears? Engaging in a universal act of reflection on ourselves, our loved ones, and our language. In each of my examples above there is an element of experimentation, ambiguity of meaning, and reaching out for shared feelings and experiences. Is the act of writing poetry, not so much about the product, nor about the ‘expression’ nor art, but is it in fact a moment of evaluation of ourselves (trans-historically), our relationships, and our language? Is it a test of the distance between our feelings and our language? When someone sits down to write is the question at the back of her mind not ‘how should I express this?’, nor even ‘what am I expressing?’, but ‘does this still work?’ Is my question not ‘why write poetry?’ but ‘why test poetry?’.
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Poetry in the Chair 