Poetry as Illumination
Lorde recognizes the potential of poetry to “illuminate” and “give birth” to ideas that would otherwise be “nameless and formless.” In other words, poetry has the power to transform something abstract and insubstantial, like a dream or concept or feeling, and make it real, concrete, and something that can be shared with and understood by others. The poetic form makes these abstract experiences into something tangible, that others can read and learn from. This paper concerns itself with the ways in which poetry creates, not the ways in which it is created. It investigates how poets fabricate works out of their experience and “illuminate” the emotions and experiences that are universally shared, and through this “illumination” act as catalysts of change in human society.
It is impossible to separate a creative individual and his or her work from the epoch into which he or she was born without losing some of the context and historical depth of the work. Individuals are enmeshed in the tensions, dreams, and temporality of the historical and cultural moment into which they are born. Their cultural experience defines the creative pursuits in which they participate and the lens through which those experiences are presented, their creative experience also sparks the ideas that are illuminated in their work. When considering the historical context of a creative work, Critics define this perspective as a “historical-biographical approach” (Guerin 22). French critic, Hippolyte Taine, directs criticism to consider the “race, milieu, et moment” in evaluating a literary work and views literary works primarily as a representation of the writer’s life (23). By “race”, he means the writer’s natural qualities and disposition; by “milieu”, he means the cultural and social circumstances of the writer; and by “moment” he means how the writer’s “race” and “milieu” play out in specific moments in history. Evaluating poetry by the poet’s “race, milieu, et moment” acknowledges the situation of a poet in society and the impact of their voice in the grander consideration of human progression and development.
Although certain genres of poetry are less representative of the poet’s life, those genres are still derived from and engaging in a cultural moment. Pastoral poetry, for example, does not reveal much about the life of a poet or always convey a picture of society, but often is a response to cultural situations, like enclosure or industrialization, and encapsulates the emotional state of a poet in response to those situations. This is not to say that a poem cannot be understood or appreciated without historical context, only that poems are artifacts of cultural worth, and understanding the historical context of a poem lends depth and meaning that would otherwise be missed. This perspective is also meant to emphasize how situated poets are within their time poets themselves are products of an age and shaped by their social and cultural experiences. Since the creation of a poem is closely interrelated with the experience of a poet, the poem itself becomes a product of the poet’s social and cultural environment. As Adrienne Rich claims, “The Personal is Political”, thus that which impacts society also impacts the poet.
When a creative individual engages in an artistic pursuit, he or she is participating in the emergence of that craft and the discourse of that craft at large. Specifically in consideration of poetry, when a poet writes a poem, he or she participates in the legacy of poetry that spans back to Ancients Greece. Whether it is the history of an idea, the development of poetic structure and style, or the questioning of social paradigms, poets engage in a lengthy discourse. They are contributing their own voice and their own experience to a larger discussion about society, culture, and life. In contributing their voice, they are also contributing the voice of their “milieu”. Poets have experiences that are shared by many within their temporality, and the “moments” that affect them, also affect the society and culture they are in. In this respect, poetry has a significant rhetorical capacity. Poetry’s unassuming guise of rhyme and form mediates its potent ability to communicate ideas that would otherwise be considered progressive, radical, or, at the very least, overly candid.
As already mentioned, poetry has a significant rhetorical capacity and shares a number of characteristics with rhetoric. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “rhetoric” is defined as “the art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others, esp. the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques to this end; the study of principles and rules to be followed by a speaker or writer striving for eloquence”, while “poetry” is defined as “composition in verse or some comparable patterned arrangement of language in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm”. Both poetry and rhetoric are explorations of the persuasive and expressive possibilities of language to communicate emotions or ideas to the reader or listener, and they use many of the same devices to persuade their readers towards an emotion, idea, or action. Considering rhetoric’s close association with the political sphere, it is unsurprising, then, that poetry holds similar political power and capacity to enact or catalyze social change.
Some of the main rhetorical devices of poetry are metaphors, metonymy and synecdoche, irony, alliteration, assonance, apostrophe (Culler 71-73). “Metaphor and metonymy are the two fundamental structures of language: if metaphor links by means of similarity, metonymy links by means of contiguity” (72). Metaphor takes something that is abstract (love, the duress of life, etc…) and simplifies it into something that is familiar and understandable to help the average reader achieve comprehension. Similar to metaphor, metonymy creates connections, but it links things within a given domain, like saying ‘the Crown’ for ‘the Queen’. Synecdoche substitutes a part for the whole, like ‘hands’ instead of ‘men’ in the phrase ‘all hands on deck’. Irony juxtaposes reality and the ideal, when “what happens is the opposite of what is expected” (73). Alliteration and assonance are both the repetition of sounds for the ends of achieving a special effect, and apostrophe is used to address something that “is not a regular listener” (71).
Alliteration and assonance, especially when used in conjunction with end rhymes, emphasize points in poetry and contribute to the resonance of a claim. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are all compelling tools for asserting an idea and ensuring the idea is well understood.
These shared features of rhetoric and poetry contribute to poetry’s potential in a political context and to the ends of inspiring a social movement. It has already been asserted that, “that which impacts society, impacts the poet”, but the reverse may also be true: that which impacts the poet, impacts society. Perhaps not in every genre or incidence of poetry, but certainly in the poetry that is participating in historical discourse and creating a new branch of ideas on the growing vine of human progression. In the discussion of poetry that is written to distill an idea, to participate in discourse, and to create change (“poetry of illumination”), this paper will transition through the original appraisals of poetry’s potential and purpose asserted by Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers before discussing the “poetry of illumination”. The “poetry of illumination” is poetry that is a product and participant of a cultural moment, such as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene of the English Renaissance. “Poetry of illumination” is also poetry that creates and defines a cultural movement, like feminist poetry. The final component of “poetry of illumination” is its ability to highlight marginalized voices in society and give them a medium to make their voices heard, as demonstrated in today’s modern American poetry.
Ancient Philosophers: Realizing Poetry’s Potential
Before discussing any of the early Greek or Roman criticism, it is necessary to consider Homer, presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was a Greek epic poet who most likely lived in the eighth century BCE, he was lauded by ancient philosophers for his exemplary works and often cited as an example of an ‘ideal’ poet. Homer was born after the Greek’s Mycenaean Age1 when the Greek world had been separated into tribal and local communities through a series of invasions. In reference to Homer’s writing of the Odyssey and Iliad, Critics claim, “one of the most interesting aspects of this was the attempt… to deal with traditional material which he no longer fully understood” (Ehrenberg 6). In one of Homer’s hymns, he describes Apollo and the muses imparting art and wisdom, and teaching him to see the world as it is and put it into song (8). As he wrote the Odyssey, he was considering the things that puzzled him about his own society, “the traditional material which he no longer fully understood”, and attempting to explain it. He sets two precedents for the tradition of poetry: first, he imparts a divine directive to future generations of poets guiding them to sing about the world “as it is”; second, he demonstrates the didactic power of a poem. The qualities Homer promotes in his works (heroism, humanity, piety, independence, love) contradict the characteristics of the society in which he lived, which was “one of self-centered individuals, where valor or excellence was based on material splendor, manly prowess, and generous hospitality rather than on any strictly ethical issues” (9). Thus, Homer becomes an early example of a poet scrutinizing his life, using poetry to illuminate the change he hopes to see in it.In light of this, it’s easy to see why ancient philosophers lauded Homer’s contributions to poetry. Except for Plato, who presents a complicated perspective on poetry in Book X of The Republic of Plato:
“We are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but… hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter… pleasure and pain will be the rulers of our state.” (Plato 358). Plato declares that poetry, specifically dramatic poetry, is misleading and full of lies it’s imitative of reality (‘mimetic’) and therefore corruptive. He claims that poetry will lead to a state ruled by pleasure and pain, not “law and the reason mankind” (358). Even though his tone is pejorative, Plato is clearly acknowledging the potential of poetry to influence a state. Whether he is acknowledging negative influence or positive influence is irrelevant, he is granting poetry a significant amount of import and potential to change the nature of a state.
Aristotle borrows Plato’s idea of ‘mimesis’, but he reframes Plato’s negative perception of poetry as corruptive to an individual and as a false representation of reality. In Poetics, Aristotle introduces the idea of ‘katharsis’, he claims poetry (tragedy) done ‘correctly’ will have a purifying effect on the troubled soul of the consumer, “affecting the proper purgation of these emotions” (Aristotle 10). According to the idea of ‘katharsis’, poetry provides a controlled outlet for the negative emotions within a society to be expressed, confronted, and expelled because poetry (or epic tragedy in the context of Poetics) simulates experiences and choices, and portrays a surrogate experiencing all the repressed and unwanted emotions from which a listener or reader can watch and learn. In addition, Aristotle considers the relationship between nature and history, relating history as “what has happened” (17), whereas poetry’s function is to relate “what may happen” (17). Thus, history is the reality, and poetry is the voice of that reality. Instead of being “imitative” or “misleading” from nature, he views the relationship between poetry and history as symbiotic rather than corruptive, or as a system where art and nature are working together to complete a whole. This interpretation leaves room for the idea that poetry works in conjunction with nature to refine it, and to better society.
Two centuries later, Horace elaborates on Aristotle’s ideas in Ars Poetica. He offers his own criticisms of the art of poetry and recommendations for how others should approach poetry, in one of his most famous line, he asserts the “aim of the poet is to inform or delight, to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life” (Horace). With the phrase “to inform or delight”, Horace is confirming that poetry (intentional poetry, anyway) is, at its base, rhetorical. It has a motivation and an end-goal for the reader, it is also carefully constructed according to the principles of ‘decorum’ for the purpose of ‘instructing and delight’; that is, he recommends that poets use common vernacular to communicate their ideas so that their message is universally understandable and that they wait a year before publishing their work to ensure it’s the message the want to send. Ultimately, he describes a methodical approach to poetry that is structured around conveying a message or an idea.
Longinus also built on Aristotle’s functions of poetry in On the Sublime. He declares poetry has a quality of ‘elevation’, which later came to be known as the ‘sublime’, and elevation has five ‘sources’ from which it derives: (1) the power of forming great conceptions, (2) inspired and vehement passion, (3) formation of figures, (4) noble diction, (5) dignified and elevated “composition” (99). These are yet more guidelines on how to create ‘worthy’ art - similar to those Aristotle spelled out for tragedies in Poetics. Longinus goes on to offer an ardent defense of art, claiming, “Art is perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature hits the mark when she contains art hidden within her” (Longinus). Art is then made into a lens or system through which nature may be enjoyed and seen more clearly. He reinforces Aristotle’s perception of art and nature as a symbiotic relationship, where each part is working together to contribute to the other and the whole. Art has thus deviates from Plato’s conviction that it is exclusively corruptive and misleading, and becomes fully recognized as a tool for improving and refining nature, or society.
Poetry has validated the assertions of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus throughout the ages by being an active voice in cultural moments. It has fulfilled its purpose “to instruct” by raising valuable questions about qualities that define society: religion, love, war, power, and morality. Like the Socratic method, these questions create a discourse about the complex dilemmas of human existence and illuminate new ideas and understanding. In this illumination of ideas, poetry often engages in political and cultural discussions that contribute to a wave of human progress in each new era.
Renaissance: Poetry as a Cultural Product and Participant
During the English Renaissance, poetry and politics were closely intermingled, and court poets had a distinct level of esteem and clout in the royal courts. Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and many more well-known and esteemed Renaissance poets actively engaged in political matters in real life and in their poetry. In Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” (or, “The Defence of Poesy”), Sidney argues that writing “could be as politically important as practical statecraft: the poet could create images of political virtue which would be imitated in future ages, and could ‘feign’ a whole commonwealth” (Norbrook 1). Like Aristotle first suggests, Sidney agrees that poetry can create a surrogate commonwealth, which can undergo simulated experiences (or the “affects” induced by tragedy) to investigate how those experiences would play out in the real world. In addition, he spins Plato’s ideas of ‘mimesis’, suggesting that the images conveyed through poetry are worth imitating as long as they are images of political virtue. This goes beyond Aristotle’s recognition of poetry as an agent of ‘katharsis’. Sidney views poetry as something that has an effect; he believes poetry moves the reader towards an ethical action when it is used for “the insight of learning, and for the treasure of knowledge” (Tuggle 40). In a letter to Hubert Languet, Sidney writes, “For why should our thoughts be aroused to various kinds of knowledge, unless we have some opportunity of exercising them so that some public benefit may results” (Duncan-Jones 282). Thus, Sidney bases the value of poetry in its ability to provide an ethical education and its ability to move readers towards an ethical action.Collaborating with Sidney’s theories, Edmund Spenser creates a ‘feigned commonwealth’ in his epic poem The Faerie Queen, published in 1590. The commonwealth of “Faerie Land” presents a kingdom where the state and universe “were all patterned on just and divinely ordained principles” (Norbrook 3). It’s no secret that one of Sidney’s purposes for The Faerie Queene was to shower Queen Elizabeth I in praise, and he did. Queen Elizabeth I is reiterated throughout the epic as Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, Medina, and, of course, The Faerie Queene herself. All these roles optimistically unveil an image of an ideal ruler who is the epitome political virtue, and is capable of reconciling all social, religious, and political conflicts (110). Thus, Sidney both presents his own optimistic hope and a poetic imagining of a ‘feigned commonwealth’ ruled by a virtuous monarch.
Within this ‘feigned commonwealth’, governed by “just and divinely ordained principles”, Spenser provides an ethical education for the early modern reader through the travails of the characters as they encounter their fears and desires. In a letter sent to Sir Walter Raleigh as a preface to The Faerie Queen, Spenser explains the purpose of “the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline” (Sidney). Each book of The Faerie Queene allegorically represents a divine virtue an ideal noble person would possess: (1) holiness, (2) temperance, (3) chastity, (4) friendship, (5) justice, and (6) courtesy. The qualities he chooses to emphasize as political virtues are founded in Christian principles, which in turn makes them divine principles.
The Faerie Queene acts in many ways as an expose of the early modern period. First, it engages in the discourse of Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas More (author of “Utopia”, another ‘feigned commonwealth’), and other early modern poets and philosophers - or poet-philosophers as so many of them were. Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” is an obvious source of inspiration for the epic poem because of embraces Sidney’s direction to provide an ethical education through poetry; more obviously, it creates a ‘feigned common wealth’ in the tradition of
Sidney’s “Arcadia”. However, unlike the “precisely political entity” of Sidney’s “Arcadia”, Spenser creates a dreamy and idealized realm in the form of epic poetry (108). By doing so, he also engages in a critical tradition harkening back to Plato. In his preface to Raleigh, he explains why the poet’s common wealth ought to be preferred to the philosopher’s (likely, this is an explicit reference to Plato’s “Republic”):
“For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato, for that the one, in the exquisite depth of his judgement, formed a commune wealth such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a government, such as might best be: so much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule” (Sidney 2016).
The second way The Faerie Queene acts as an expose of the early modern period is that it betrays the desire of post-Reformation Britain for a period of stability led by a monarch capable of reconciling the division between liberal and conservative, and Catholic and Protestant. It’s also easy to draw explicit links between the various books of The Faerie Queene and historical events; such as, the English attempt to “bring the Irish to civility” with Calidore’s quest to defeat the Blatant Beast in Book VI. Finally, The Faerie Queene reflects the ideals of courtly society, as well as the struggle of a “gentleman or noble man” to fulfill Christian virtues. Sidney creates surrogates for early modern men through the characters of The Faerie Queene, like Redcrosse and Calidore, that could endure the challenges of a virtuous life for them - temptations, fears, existential crises, and all and show the rewards of living a virtuous life.
Through The Faerie Queene, it is evident how a literary work is a product of its author’s “race, milieu, et moment”. Spenser, a courtier himself, would have been exposed to the works of Plato and Aristotle, and engaged with other ‘poet-philosophers’ of the court, like Sidney and Raleigh. He would have been familiar with the challenges the culture of the court poised to living a virtuous life, and been inclined to share his ideas so as to create an environment that is favorable to his own poetic and, in this case, spiritual and humanist values. His Protestant beliefs heavily influenced The Faerie Queen, as witnessed in his evil characterizations of the Catholic Church as Archimago and Duessa. In addition, Spenser’s proximity to Queen Elizabeth I allowed him to entertain the notion of becoming a favored court poet, thus encouraging him to write uncharacteristically independent female characters into The Faerie Queene to represent her. These are all examples of Spenser’s “milieu”, or his cultural and social circumstances. The “moment” of The Faerie Queene is contingent on which book one is reading. Since Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene over a number of years, each book is inspired by different historical circumstances. Book IV has already been mentioned in reference to the English attempts to ‘civilize’ Ireland. Book I, featuring Archimago and Duessa, featured the longstanding animosity between the Catholic Church and Protestantism. It was likely inspired by the ongoing attempts on Elizabeth I’s life by the Catholic Church and Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I’s Catholic competitor for the throne.
Spenser, then, is shown to be a product of his culture and a participant in the cultural movements occurring in the early modern period. Whether “gentlemen and noble men” received his works in the way he hoped and were indeed moved towards ethical action is hard to quantify, but it can be said for certain that Spenser’s ideas converged with those of Shakespeare and other humanists of the Renaissance in his discussion of universal human truths through the allegorical representations of virtues, vices, and social ills in The Faerie Queene.
Feminism: Poetry Creating Consciousness
Poetry has had a role in nearly every revolutionary movement, but perhaps never so much as in the second wave of the Women’s Movement. Andrea Chessman and Polly Joan claim in their Guide to Women’s Publishing that, “poetry was the medium of the movement” (Reed 91).Beginning in the 1960’s, feminist poets enthusiastically created poetry that revealed the essence of the female experience. They wrote about uniquely female bodily functions, like childbirth and menstruation, as well as uniquely female experiences: the conundrum between men as oppressors and men as lovers; the sexual repression of women; the struggles of women in a male-dominated workplace, and the impact of ‘traditional women’s work’ (90). The movement structured itself around the use of language, especially poetry, as a tool for creating a cultural consciousness that concerned itself with the lives of women.
In T.V. Reed’s book Art of Protest: Culture and Activisim from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle, Reed claims: (91)
“The movement understood that knowledge was power, and that knowledge/power was vested in language. At the center of this was the notion that dimension of women’s voices had been silenced, distorted, or trivialized for centuries. Thus poetry, as one of the richest tools for exploring the dynamic meaning-making processes of language was bound to become an important movement resource.”
Her claim refers back to Audra Lorde’s quote included at the beginning of this paper, in which Lorde explains, “knowledge births (precedes) understanding”. The women’s movement was after more than placation, they wanted the voices of women to be represented and heard. They wanted understanding and action. In disseminating their ideas, they didn’t begin with the entirety of society. They started with small groups of women meeting in small discussion groups, where they would share their experiences and use it to discuss the broader political and social inequality of women. Reed refers to this as “consciousness-raising” (78). When considered in comparison to Lorde’s process for writing poetry, they are not very different: both begin with the distillation of experience and result in understanding. Thus, poetry became one of the most important tools of “consciousness-raising” in the second women’s movement, and rallied huge swaths of accomplished poets to its cause, Audra Lorde and Adrienne Rich obviously included. Inspired by the women’s movement, a separate feminist poetry movement grew in parallel.
The feminist poetry movement, of course, developed outside of and in parallel with the women’s movement. Kim Whitehead, a historian of feminist poetry, writes, “feminist poetry began in a hundred places at once, in writing workshops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables of self-publishing poet/activists, and in the work of already established poets who began slowly to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibilities” (96). Feminist poets emerged out of the second women’s movement, as they were encouraged to voice their experiences being “marginalized, stifled, or distorted by the male-dominated institutions and formations of the poetry world”, and were often sponsored by the more well-known and established poet-leaders of the second women’s movement (Reed 96).
Eventually the feminist poetry movement gained official recognition as a literary and critical development. With poets like Muriel Rukeyser, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1935, and Adrienne Rich, who also won the Yale prize, at the helm, they became teachers of poetry and poetics to the diverse poets emerging out of the second women’s movement. Scholars and practitioners of the feminist poetry movement began the difficult task of searching history for more information about roots of the women’s movement, and re-interpreting classical literary texts composed by well-known women authors, like Emily Dickinson, through a new lens of criticism. The feminist poetry movement was bolstered by three other compatible developments in the field of poetry: (1) Public poetry performances by “beat poets” were back en vogue, and the public poetry performances added yet another outlet for consciousness-raising, where feminist poets began a tradition of public readings in feminist bookstores, music festivals, and demonstrations (97); (2) The confessional school of poetry, from which poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton emerged, offered a new template for psychological examination, especially the “psychological dynamics of emerging feminist experience” (97); (3) the “Black Mountain poets” embraced open, free-verse forms, which proved to be “better suited to explorations of self-in- society” and was a less intimidating form for emerging feminist poets to employ. By the end of the twentieth century, the feminist poetry movement, in conjunction with the second women’s movement, had seamlessly enmeshed parallel poetic developments into its tradition, and thereby expanded its own dominance (99). It had cemented itself as a movement worth studying in its own right, and a fascinating new lens for reevaluating the literary works, social movements, and historical developments throughout history.
Poetry’s role in the second women’s movement and its development in the feminist poetry movement demonstrates how the convergence of progressivism and poetry has the potential to catalyze tangible change and create a more equitable society. It shows poetry as a creator in multiple capacities. Poetry is a ‘consciousness-raiser’ and capable of diffusing powerful ideas throughout society. These ideas help shape a new cultural consciousness of understanding and awareness. It also shows how poetry recreates itself and assimilates to its cultural environment, as indicated during the women’s movement with the acceptance of free verse as a poetic form.
Poetry Today
Poetry’s flexibility has helped preserve it and keep it relevant for centuries from the Renaissance until today. Even though today’s poetry looks nothing like the epic poetry of The Faerie Queene, it juggles many of the same questions of political virtue, social justice, and how to reform a broken society. In doing so, poetry creates a megaphone for the marginalized and oppressed, amplifying their quiet voices. Poetry provides an artistic medium in which even the most disenfranchised groups can participate, thus creating a bridge between the dominant social groups and those on the fringes. Today, poetry has also created a confessional, a space for “owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry. Poems willing to enter into this fraught space don’t merely stand on the bank calling out instructions on how or what to believe; they take us by the arm and walk us into the lake, wetting us with the muddied and the muddled, and sometimes even the holy” (Smith).Modern American poetry skews towards a form free of meter and rhyme. In his essay “Ventures, on an Old Theme”, Walt Whitman describes the use of free verse as “free flights in all the directions not tolerated by society.” He argues that free verse poetry does society a service by stripping away the rules and convention that confine it and exploring the possibilities that lie beneath. Whitman equivocates the rules and conventions of poetry to the rules and conventions of society. He represents the dual reality of humans: in public, people compose their appearance and behavior to accommodate a social expectation; at home, people feel free to undress and wash, and strip off the self that is composed according to the rules of society. Just so, poetry that concerns itself too much with poetic conventions loses its freedom of expression.
In stripping away social conventions, this new approach also strips away the stipulations of class and race that may exclude some demographics from participating. The adoption of free verse into the poetry of the women’s movement (referred to in the last section) is an example of how shedding some of the strict conventions of poetry helped to make it more accessible to a wider variety of people, and made it a better suited art for the discussion of self-in-society. Shedding the stuffy conventions of poetry shifts the focus of a poem from end rhymes and metrical patterns to its intimate message. However, this is not to say that modern American poetry is void of all rhyme or rhythm. It’s quite the contrary. Spoken word poetry, for example, prioritizes the rhetorical capacity of its message and asks what rhythmic, meaningful vocalization will help ensure the reception and resonance of its message.
Modern American poetry, and especially spoken word poetry, has made its way into mass media. Its ability to perform cultural work is exponentially amplified through the internet, television, and audio or video recordings, that allow it to be shared and distributed within the culture at large. Tracy K. Smith describes poetry’s interaction in this context as “seeking revelation not in privacy, but in community. Not in the meditative mind but in bustling bodies in shared space, in the transactions our physical selves are marked and marred by.” However, “seeking revelation… in community” is nothing new, as demonstrated with The Faerie Queene. Poets spanning back to the sixteenth century have outwardly engaged with civic life through their poetry, participating “in the marketplace where we all gather” (Pinsky). The new media dominance of poetry is simply an expansion of the coffee shop “consciousness-raising” of the women’s movement, or court poetry written to “fashion a gentleman” of the Renaissance. It’s all part of the process of illumination: experience sparking an idea, then discourse lighting a path to change.
Conclusion
From ancient Greek criticism to modern activist poetry, people have recognized the impact poetry has on society and its powerful capacity to move people to action, to evoke empathy, and to illuminate cultural movements. It has demonstrated its worth as a cultural artifact and as a tool for cultural discussion through its closely associated production with major social, political, and economic movements. Whether it is produced in parallel, in response, or as a catalyst for a particular movement, poetry invariably stems from the experience of a person who exists within a unique moment in time. It has the potential to resonate with the successes, tensions, and frustrations of the poet’s temporality, and send echoes throughout time that encapsulate the emotional and physical experience of an individual. In just a select number of carefully chosen words, poetry can capture a glimpse of a complex and ever-changing cultural zeitgeist and immortalize it.Poetry lends itself to many forms of development: linguistic, philosophical, and political, to name a few. In poetry, each of these facets of human society finds an outlet for refinement, distillation, discourse, and revolution. The development of cultural movements, like feminism, highlights poetry’s role in instigating the social consciousness that leads to reform (or revolution). Initially, poetry provides a gentle medium for counter-cultural ideas to be expressed, thus beginning the slow push towards social progress. As more voices are added to the mix, the convergence of ideas creates a social consciousness, and from that consciousness comes a “moment” when the cacophony of voices demand change. In the words of Audra Lorde, “this is poetry as illumination.”
Works Cited
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Tuggle, Bradley Davin. A Poetics of Emotion: Sidney, Spenser, and the Poetry of Thoughtful Movement. 2011. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
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Charlee Laurie is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate of Arts in English.