Poetry is said to be a meticulous,
well- thought out, and aesthetically pleasing piece of literature that
primarily communicates experience rather than to convey knowledge. It helps
humans to better understand how life is
rather than how life works.
Its function is not to tell us about experience but to allow us imaginatively
to participate in it. It is a means of allowing us, through the imagination, to
live more fully, more deeply, more richly, and with greater awareness. It can
do this in two ways: by broadening our experience- that is, by making us
acquainted with a range of experience with which in the ordinary course of
events we might have no contact, or by deepening our experience- that is, by
making us feel more poignantly and more understandingly the everyday
experiences all of us have.
For centuries, cultures have used
poetry as a way of giving humans a sense of understanding “the everyday
experiences all of us have”. Poetry is not meant to be a long and precise
description of something that occurred, but rather a speaker’s perspective of
something they physically or mentally endured. For example, one such poem
titled Suicide’s Note, consists of
only three lines and few words but leaves readers feeling apprehensive:
The calm,
Cool face
of the river
Asked me
for a kiss.
Clearly, the writer has not
experienced suicide because he was able to compose a poem about it. Although he
has not undergone such a horrific incident, he wrote what he thought an
encounter with death would be like.
A poem does not have to be the story of one’s life- it can simply be
a melodically put statement of human emotions and senses that has an imaginative
dimension to it.
Source: Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
Written by Thomas R. Arp and
Greg Johnson
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