PRELIMINARY

Seeking the ultimate source of the power of poetry in the nature of language and the nature of words

What is poetry and what is not poetry, looking for the essence of the poem. How to sort it all out?

Is poetry peripheral? A minority hobby?

Why so much money for Ted Hughes' casual papers?

Does it matter more than reading a novel or a newspaper, watching sport or game-shows on television ? If someone is not exposed to poetry (or music) they don't know its power, its relevance

Poetry is serious, rarely light-hearted.

Perhaps poetry can be seen as the inner movement in the culture - in the society.

Time tests poetry - many imposing works – epics, plays - have gone down into dust and silence

Powerful poetry is timeless; What lasts is the effective poem

A poem as an event in time, both produced and reproducing.

WHAT IS POETRY AND HOW MAY IT BE DEFINED?

What sort of a thing is a poem, poetry? It is object and process

Recognising the poem as poem, poetry as poetry

What is not a poem, what is not poetry

A poem is a thing, an object

Like a piece of music, like a painting, like a sculpture

It is there, it is here - It can be handed down over time, passed from hand to hand now

The material, the paints, for poetry are the sounds of speech, the sound-structures of the words

Poem - poema - a thing - a constructed thing

Not an objet trouvé A made thing

Made by somebody at some time

A continuing thing With its distinguishing material

– words for speaking

It doesn't need notes to explain background or references to contemporary events, to the the personal history of the poet

It does not need paraphrase, it doesn't need or facilitate translation

What is poetry as the art of the poet? One can quote Shakespeare:

«The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.» (Midsummer Night's Dream V.i.7)

How poetry should be defined, characterised, has been the subject of debate over centuries - but at least we can say that poetry is the use of powerful or specially effective words, where the individual words and the order in which they are placed matters; in the ordinary use of language, the individual words and the order in which they are placed does not matter - we extract the meaning and rapidly forget how it was phrased or expressed.

However that may be, we have the present fact of poetry as one of the arts, to be accounted for. Poets and others have attempted to describe what poetry is for them, what the process is by which poems are produced.

Some examples:

Or est poème ce qui ne se peut résumer. On ne résume pas une mélodie. La puissance des vers tient à une harmonie indéfinissable entre ce qu'ils disent et ce qu'ils sont. (Valery)

The labyrinthine communings of words

Above everything else, poetry is words, and words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds. In poetry, the word seems to operate as a unity of all its powers.

A poem is a structure of words which persists. The poem operates by creating a sound-structure which preserves the actual words. Rhyme locks the words of a poem together, as do repetition and rhythmic patterning or assonance and alliteration.

The network of words which forms the poem preserves in it the 'iceberg' words, the words which go deep into the conceptual and emotional structure of the individual.

ATTEMPTS TO DEFINE POETRY

Objects called poems are said to embody poetry

Rhythm - strict metrical forms - the sonnet - the hexameter - the iambic

Poetry what is left behind in translation [Robert Frost]

Swift "the best words in the best order" [uninformative]

Emotion recollected in tranquillity. Tranquillity is not the state of mind for the poem - the poem is shaped at the moment of experience perception or feeling or understanding) not later. Not coolly revised in tranquillity.

PROSE AND POETRY

Prose is continuous, not divided into lines. In contrast, the form of the poem serves to indicate that it is not to be approached as prose, that one should not look for a repeatable meaning, that there’s something different from ordinary speech, ordinary conversation, something special to do with the essential nature of words.

Prose is for meaning. In prose,the particular words don't matter, are forgotten immediately after being read, transduced instantly so that the content can be paraphrased, reported, summarised or translated.

Prose is walking, poetry is dancing [Valery]

POETRY AND SCIENCE

Poetry should be seen not in opposition to prose but as in opposition to science, the exploration of the internal world (via language) as contrasted with science, the exploration of the external world.

St. John Perse suggested this in his 1960 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"De ce nuit originelle où tàtonnent deux aveugles-nés, l'un équipé de l'outillage scientifique, l'autre assisté des seules fulgurations de l'intuition... Le mystère est commun. Aussi loin que la science recule ses frontières, et sur tout l'arc étendu de ces frontières, on entendra courir encore la meute chasseresse du poéte. C'est d'une même étreinte [que la poésie]... embrasse au présent tout le passé et l'avenir, l'humain avec le surhumain, et tout l'espace planétaire avec l'espace universel. L'obscurité qu'on lui reproche ne tient pas à sa nature propre, qui est d'éclairer, mais à la nuit même qu'elle explore et qu'elle doit d'explorer : celle de l'àme elle-même et du mystère où baigne l'être humain"

Or in a free English translation:

In that primitive night where two men, both born blind, grope for their way, the one equipped with all the tools of science, the other guided only by the lights of his mental vision….. The mystery is common to both. However far the frontiers of science are extended, over the whole arc of these frontiers one hears the cry of the poet's hounds in chase. More than a mode of perception, poetry is above all a way of life, of life as a unity. With one embrace, poetry clasps past and future together in the present, the human with the superhuman, the planetary space with universal space. The obscurity for which poetry is reproached is not an attribute of its nature, its nature is to bring light. The obscurity is of the night which it explores, the night of the soul and the mystery in which human existence is shrouded.

RESPONDING TO THE POEM

Poetry is better discussed not in general terms but in the light of experience of actual poems, of an active approach to the individual poem.

Keats: Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts

Emily Dickinson: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Poetry, the particular poem, plays on the individual hearer or reader, like an instrument played on by a musician (no doubt, as with music, there can be tone-deaf, poem-deaf individuals).

So, how to proceed?

Zoom in on a particular poem or on a selection of poems. How to pick the exemplars?

Present-day poems or poems of previous times? Present-day poets have not been tested by time, have not undergone the filtering by the generations which has left the great poems standing as ‘monuments’ (T.S.Eliot)

SELECTED POEMS

Action is transitory, - a step, a blow
The motion of a muscle, this way or that -
Tis done and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed [Wordsworth]

My apprehensions come in crowds;
I dread the rustling of the grass
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass [Wordsworth]

And what is Life? - an hour-glass on the run
A mist retreating from the morning sun
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length? - A minute's pause, a moment's thought;
And happiness? - A bubble on the stream
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought [John Clare]

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light [Dylan Thomas]

O Unicorn among the cedars
To whom no magic charm can lead us
White childhood moving like a sigh
through the green woods unharmed in thy
Sophisticated innocence [Auden]

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes [Byron]

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares
my feast of joy is but a dish of pain
My crop of corn is but a field of tares
And all my good is but vain hope of gain
The day is past and yet I saw no sun
And now I live and now my life is done [Chidiack Tichborne]

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd in the water; the poop was beaten gold
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,
Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. [Antony and Cleopatra]

RESPONDING TO THE POEMS

How do we respond to these poems, these particular words, the way the words are strung together? How do we react to them, resonate to them?

We may be moved by the words and the order of the words in the poem – but how do the words and ordering make each poem effective? What are words that they should do this, produce feelings, emotions, memories, perceptions? Do the words of the poem remain with us?

THE POET IN THE PROCESS OF COMPOSING A POEM

What does he (the assumed poet) think he doing, trying to do? Concerned with prestige of being a poet, professing himself as a poet? There may be the wish to produce poetry but not necessarily the ability. What is produced may be a simulation of a poem - or simply poetry without power.

There is the poetic impulse, the feeling for words, as Dylan Thomas described it:

"I cared for the shapes of sound that their names made in my ears. I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes What mattered was the sound of them 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 milkcarts,

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."

Poetry is both perception and the thing perceived. Poetic form far from being a mere public convention is the personal and organic made objective and accessible: giving form to the living stuff of the imagination. Poetry like science is the process of discovering. Poets compose in order to understand, not in order to be understood: the poet's relentless compulsion to know himself. The structure of poetry is an exact presentation of the nature of human perception.

A poem is formed of carefully selected words and is thus a representation of a particular pattern of brain organisation. The words are not simply a linear string but a multi-dimensional structure where all the words forming the poem interact. A poem resembles in this way patterns in music, the combination of melody and harmony. Because the poetic form preserves the selected words, the success of the poem flows from the power of the individual words, the power of the 'iceberg' words. One gains the impression that though the external form is different, the process in the production of poetry is close to that in the production of music or the visual arts.

MIND AND POETRY

What is the precursor of the poem? It emerges out of the life lived and the mind worked (out of the poet’s mind shaped by his life). The poem is, or was, a piece of the poet’s mind. Coleridge was astonished by Shakespeare’s ‘oceanic mind’.

"His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. ... for his wit can no more be hid, then it could be lost." [Heming]

What is going on in the poet’s brain as he composes - as the poem emerges? The words are already there, the syntactic forms are already there. New connections are being formed between neurons, new neuronal assemblies being constructed.

The intellectual content, the contemporary content of the poem, current or recent wars, the social changes, the fashionable topics – is passing. What survives the years is the essential poetry. This is why it is hard - or impossible - to assess the lasting value of the poetry of living poets – which may have extraneous attractions, non-poetic references

The lasting power of the poem, of poetry, comes from the individual words, the richness of the language in which the poem is written, the structure of the mind of the individual poet, and the shared humanity – empathetic action – of what the poem is about.

The poet, as much as or more than the musician or the artist, is concerned with externalising his inner world (to use Paul Klee's phrase) - an inner world formed by his experience of and reaction to the ordinary physical and social world. The source of the effective poem, as of the effective musical composition or painting, is within the neural structuring of the poet. The basis of poetry is as much neural and physiological as the basis of music or painting; the sources of the poetry are in the emotions, in the life-experience, the bodily sensations, the perception of the poet, just as much as the case for the musician or artist. The mystery, as for music, is how the internal, neural, structure, recording the experience, programming the emotions, is converted, transduced, into words; how words, those apparently arbitrary, social constructs, can be effective in conveying to the poet himself and to others responsive to poetry such intangible, invisible, ineffable things.

What matters is the poem, not so much the poet.

The (raw?) material is words (as paints and canvas) (+ time and order). Language is a system of words. It is through words that language has changed human beings. Poetry is a work of art - a work of words. What wonders can be worked with words - intense perception (emotion) extruded as words.

Poetry is powerful and the power comes from the power of the words which form the poems - but what can be said about the source of the power of poetic words?

There is the general power of words in poetry or otherwise. Words crystallise our thoughts, Make our thoughts recoverable, Make the thought of others recoverable; but in poetry the particular words chosen matter much more than they do in the case of words for simple communication. Poetry calls upon the full content, the total complex, of each word.

FROM POETRY TO SCIENCE

Beyond poetry then there is the greater mystery of the functioning of language. An evolutionary account of language is possible and is a prerequisite, no doubt, for an evolutionary account of poetry. This is not the place to discuss this larger issue. I have suggested elsewhere (Allott 1988) that the complexities of language derived from, were modelled on and integrated with the neural motor control system (speech is skilled motor action) and that all the structures of language, syntax, lexicon, phonology, can be traced back to the already elaborated complexities of the motor system.

The particular word, on the motor theory of language origin and function, was not an arbitrary formation, with an arbitrary relation to its meaning but a structure derived from and parallel to the elements forming the structure of the percept or the action. The word is a specific pattern of neural organisation directly related to neural organisation involved in perceiving some specific object or performing some specific act. The effectiveness of language results from the transmission via articulated sound of a pattern of neural organisation from the speaker to the hearer, who reproduces in his own neural organisation an order, a structure, homoeomorphic with the pattern in the speaker.

If this is so, then poetry also must be a product of the intersection between motor control and perception, the concrete neural set of connections between the motor and perceptual systems in the brain. If emotions also are essentially motor-based - emotion in some sense is motion - than one begins to understand the power of poetry. What is powerful for the producer of the poetry can be powerful for the receiver of poetry, the person responsive to poetry, because he has similar neural structuring to that from which the poem originates,

How could words do all these things?

Because:

.Words are not arbitrary

Words have made humans into what they are now

But where did the words come from:

Words came from gestures.

WORDS AND GESTURES

Where do the gestures come from?

Gestures come from perception (visual, auditory and other sensation) of the world, of the human being’s own bodily experience - shapes, sounds, movements etc.

The universality of gesture? Seeing gesture as at the origin of language (Condillac)

Gesture manifests the relation between language and action. It was at the origin of language and is of central importance in the relation between motor articulation and the motor storage of the concepts and percepts from which individual words derive their meaning

Was each gesture as arbitrary as traditional linguistics says that each word is?

Clearly not.

Gestures of all kinds were generated by imitation of actions, shapes and sounds. These were stored as motor programs before humans acquired speech.

"The discovery of mirror neurons may provide a new, though still sketchy, neurobiological basis to account for the emergence of language" (Gallese)

FROM GESTURE TO SPEECH

"Neuroanatomically, the step from genetically determined controlled vocal patterns is associated with the emergence of a direct connection between the motor cortex and the laryngeal motoneurons, a connection lacking in subhuman primates" [Jurgens]

Cerebral reorganisation provided new direct connections between the motor cortex, the tongue and the larynx.

There was a great increase in the innervation of the articulatory apparatus generally.

Motor programs from gestural origins were transduced automatically into articulated words structured by the gestural programs.

The meanings of words were automatically linked to the actions, sounds and shapes to which the gestures referred.

The process by which words were formed was the inverse of the process by which gestures and sounds can be generated from existing word-forms - a reverse application of motor equivalence.

On seeing some one hitting something, the action patterning was by motor equivalence converted into articulatory patterning to produce a speech-sound structure, a word, directly related to the action patterning seen.

So we arrive at science, at neuroscience, at the organisation of the body and brain from which poetry emerges

But arriving at the science beneath poetry in no way affects or diminishes the power of poetry

Any more than analysing the acoustic properties of the voice or instruments diminishes the power of music

Poetry survives and the great poems will survive