What does it all mean, poet? Well,
Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell.
What we felt only ; you expressed ,
You hold things beautiful the best,
And pace them in rhyme so, side by side.
-Robert Browning
Defining poetry is not as easy as it seems to be. It's like a great mystery that requires an in-depth perception and analysis of its nature, power and function. Carlyle defines it as "nothing but musical thought". Shelley calls it the "expression of imagination". According to Coleridge, it is a composition of "best words in best orders" ; its immediate object is to yield pleasure and not truth. Matthew Arnold explains it as a "criticism of life" and "the perfect form of utterance that human words can reach". Some poets like Milton wrote poetry to earn honor, fame and immortality and to produce something which “posterity will not let die' ; while others like Bridges wrote for the sheer joy of it and for artistic pleasure ,wishing their poems to be short lived and to die before their fame was spread. Bridges sang :
My song is like a flower ;
I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ .
It is obvious ,therefore , that poetry may have different inspirations or motives but it is difficult to contain it within a certain formula . All poetry expresses someone's feelings and , thereby, it attempts to awaken the corresponding emotions in the hearts of others .All of us are poets in a measure because all of us have feelings and the power to express. There are certain moments in our life when our breath is held or lost under the stress of a deep emotion caused by love or when we stand enthralled before an object of beauty. So what's so special about a poet ? Well, those we call poets are more sensitive , with a wider range of feelings ; and better able to express what they feel , and move others to share their feelings .
Poetry requires a manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man ; it requires ,what we call , "poetic genius". We may feel about a thing , but we may not be able to express our feelings well, whereas a poet can express it in his uniquely appealing way. Thus, the feeling , when intensely inspired by imagination and suitably aided by the power of expression , gives rise to poetry . Poets are moved deeply by feeling and imagination and they feel restless without utterance .They sing because they must .And herein lies the true merit of a poet and ,thereby, the mysterious beauty of poetry .
A true poet is one who makes the reader feel what he felt himself about a thing when he wrote. We appreciate a great poet because while reading him we begin to feel something of the very inspiration and emotions which had stirred the mind of the poet . We feel, as it were, elevated to the heights of poet's imagination. For example, when Shelley laments: "I fall upon the thorns of life , I bleed !" ,we begin to search our own wounds. It's as if we become Shelley for the moment when we are reading his poetry.
The poet opens new gateways in our souls. We find poets who were moved to passion by objects that we hardly notice , or from those aspects of familiar happenings that we have come to ignore. Their strong emotions arise from their fresh vision. The world never ceases to be an interesting place for them . Blake expresses this truth in his inspired lines:
What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles and tears.
In many places ,where there is a shy and a subtle beauty that most of us would never see , a poet's eye discovers it and his voice makes us realize it. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and rows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a meadow , where girls are making hay and singing as they work .He is moved by the sight ,sees the truth and beauty where we see only dead grass , and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its story :
A flower of the past ,
I have drunk my last sweet drop of dew
Girls singing me to death;
And the moon will still shine,
To look for the dew.
One who reads these lines can never again see hay without recalling the emotion expressed by the poet. This way of viewing things, which by its novelty , expresses and appeals to us, is what we call as "poetic imagination". Without imagination , feeling and passion there can be no poetry. To create poetry, emotions are transformed into a music of words , clear and beautiful .They may be terrible or saddening ,but still beautiful ; for it has been said that the greatest mystery of poetry is its power to render the saddest things with beauty.
Real poetry is the inner voice of entire mankind. It is, says Carlyle, “not only a criticism of life ,it is the very truth of life- the very essence of man's noble quest for reaching the kingdom of Eternal bliss.”The world of poetry is ever blissful. The matter of poetic creation is supplied by the many experiences of day-to-day life. The poet aims at reproducing life as he finds it around him, but he also does more : he tries to recreate that life with the help of his unique vision.The two aspects of reality and ideals are poised on the wings of the poet's imagination. He may dream us away into the magic world of a fairyland or move us with the sweet sad music of humanity.
Thus, we can say that poetry occupies a unique place in the enrichment of humanity. It fuels the soul on its journey towards the Eternal bliss. It helps us in a better realization of life. It is this mystery called poetry that a poet brings to us and which may be summed up in these beautiful lines from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" :
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see,what things they be ;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality !
