Ars Poetica

When asked what motivated him to read and eventually to write poetry, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas responded “Because I have fallen in love with words.” It was the sound of words as well as their meaning that attracted him to language. That combination of sound and meaning is the very essence of poetry. All writers use words to explain as well as to define; but a poet, by the very nature of his craft, is forced to an economy of words. The poet carefully selects words both for optimum sound as well as intensity of meaning. Poetry then is a true distillation of language. And the English language provides fertile ground for both.

Through the words left to us by the Angles and the Saxons, and the Vikings, their hard consonants gave the language power that explodes on the tongue. The softer sounds of these consonants, a gift from the Frisians and the Celts add nuance to consonant sound. The Latin of the Roman occupation of Britain gives definition and exactitude to our words, while the Greek words the Romans also brought to the island, allows us to create words for concepts, the “isms” and “ologies” of our language. When the Norman French invaded in 1066, they added words that offered alternatives to common nouns and verbs, softening the sound and adding a musical quality to the language. Shakespeare, through 154 sonnets, 37 plays and various poems expanded the language by adding words from all of these sources, freeing their sound as well as deepening their meaning. English then becomes an elastic and flexible language, whose nuance in meaning is reinforced by the breath of its sounds, sounds that crackle with the tap and snap of the hard consonants, as well as the slide and elide of their smooth vowels. As Dylan Thomas explains in his Notes on the Art of Poetry

…before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea and rain, the rattle of milk-carts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.

This intensified use of sound is found in the techniques poets use to heighten what the listener hears when poetry is read aloud. Poetry, after all, was written to be read aloud. Techniques like alliteration, assonance and consonance, simile and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme are what ultimately define poetry, giving it not only the musical qualities that make it both memorable and memorize able but expanding the horizons of its meaning as well.

Today, students are taught that the only ingredient a poem needs to make it a poem is rhythm. This rhythm does not always have to be, or even ever have to be, a proscribed meter; but simply the cadence of the language. Narrative poetry can be just as rhythmic as the lyric poetry that is eventually put to music to become the lyrics of song. A poem also needs a point or focus. Whether it be to capture the falling of a single leaf as it drifts down from the branch of a tree, to describe the feeling one has when one first sees the tall marble columns of the Parthenon, to tell the story of an important or personal event in the life of a child, a king, or a country, to sweetly or bitterly remember a past memory, or to plead for peace in a time of war, poetry is the lens through which these impressions are given description, explication and voice.

Each generation of poets finds different methods and forms to capture these impressions. Each generation develops new standards from which these forms take shape. But no generation of poets should impose the tyranny of orthodoxy on the continuous flow of what a poem really is. While the sonnet is a form of poetry that usually contains fourteen lines, Petrarch, Spencer and Shakespeare all wrote them differently. A century later, John Donne wrote sonnets with more than fourteen lines, and chose his own meter and rhyme scheme. Today, when sonnet writers are not using one of these forms, they are inventing forms of their own, using their own cadences to capture their own particular impressions of life. Yet each is rhythmic and each has a purpose.

It is in the rhythm of the line, its sound and its meaning, that should encourage the reader to approach poetry, to read it and to remember it. For poets, more than novelists or playwrights, should be the true craftsmen of our language. As Dylan Thomas puts it “The joy and function of poetry was, and is, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”