What Actually is Poetry?

 by Dawn S

A few weeks ago, my friend and I were discussing one of our A-Level English texts when she remarked ‘I still don’t know what English actually is. It’s fun, but what is it for?’. A few months previously, my brother in Year 9 asked a similar question — ‘what makes a poem a poem?’. Lower down the school, he was shown poems with a regular stanzaic structure and rhyme scheme; now, with the introduction of free verse into his life, questions arose around where the boundaries truly lay. The answer I gave him was not a very good one, and in fact I expect it served to complicate the matter — I talked about the phenomenon of ‘prose poetry’, a form which is labelled as poetry but has no line breaks at all and is structured like prose; showed him the poetry of Imagist poet William Carlos Williams, whose work served to challenge common notions of the nature of poetry itself; and told him that essentially poetry could be whatever one wanted it to be, in terms of structure, content and even meaning — but that on a basic level, a poem tends to be a short-form text that does not follow usual conventions of prose or script writing. Probably not the best answer to give to a Year 9 reading free verse poetry for the first time, and there are multiple flaws in the argument anyway — epic poetry, for example, is often longer than novel-length and so is definitely not a short-form text, and many plays and even some novels are themselves written in verse. Even the Oxford English Dictionary’s translation is frustratingly vague — ‘The art or work of a poet. 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; the art of such a composition’.

Well, I should have known better than to believe that ‘what is poetry’ should be a question with a definitive answer. This is literature, after all, the subject where definitive answers are a myth. Maybe the question itself is, paradoxically, part of its own answer — poetry is a form made to prompt questions, a form constantly testing its own boundaries. Originally, poetry was transferred only through oral tradition, and while rhyme was essential, as a solely spoken form, early poetry did not have the line breaks that we often view as the hallmark of poetry today. Now, the configuration of line breaks is often central to how we read and analyse poetry — as any GCSE English student will be able to tell you, use of devices to do with line structure, such as enjambment and caesura, can significantly alter the tone and sometimes the subtext of a poem. When there are no line breaks at all, as is the case in prose poetry, this is also a conscious choice, and often serves to give the poem a greater sense of fluidity, or a more stream-of-consciousness or narrative feel — and sometimes, the form is used simply because line breaks don’t quite work in some cases. To test this theory, I attempted to add line breaks to a prose poem by Ada Limón — I tried this in a few iterations, placing the line breaks at different points — and none of them really worked; the text felt clunky, or wordy, or even confusing, whereas in prose form the poem (‘After His Ex Died’, if you want to look it up) flows beautifully, despite straying significantly from the original subject matter. Perhaps the closest we will get to a definition of ‘poetry’, therefore, is a text in which every word, structure or formatting choice is a uniquely conscious decision — as opposed to in the case of the novel, for example, which, though it contains many conscious artistic decisions as to how meaning is shaped, is not always crafted so intricately on a granular level.

So, if that’s what poetry is (more or less), back to my friend’s question from the start of this article — what is it for? In a different conversation, the same friend and I were talking about Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (I promise our friendship doesn’t consist only of conversations about A-Level set texts, despite what it may seem), and we were trying to figure out quite what Larkin was getting at through the ambiguous, doubt-filled tone of the poem. The subject of the poem is a stone tomb from 1375, displaying a statue of an earl and countess lying in bed together; I suggested that the line ‘helpless in the hollow of / An unarmorial age’ is imbued with a sense of loneliness, to which she replied ‘how can they be lonely, they’re statues’. Well, you know, I said, it’s a poem, you’ve got to allow him some artistic licence. But then we got to the famous final couplet — ‘and to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love’ — and we realised that perhaps that is exactly what the idea of the ‘almost-instinct’ is getting at. It’s a lovely sentiment to have, that once we are gone our love will be preserved — but by referring to it as an ‘almost-instinct’ only, Larkin suggests that we know, really, that this ideal isn’t true. The earl and countess of the poem are statues. The tomb is a symbol of status, perhaps, but not of enduring love (especially given the frequent suggestions in the poem that the two did not intend or wish for their brief love to be immortalised at all). 

Poetry teaches us about the world. It presents us with ideas we are familiar with (‘what will survive of us is love’) and challenges them. It introduces us to narrators, situations, emotions we would not necessarily have encountered otherwise, increasing our empathy and widening our understanding of the world and the people around us. It allows us to form our own interpretations, not just of a poem itself, but the wider concepts it explores — we read ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and have a choice: do we agree with its scepticism and ground ourselves only in the realistic, or do we lean into the metaphorical and listen to what it has to say, suspend our disbelief that statues can experience loneliness and through doing so maybe learn something about time or love or the nature of identity?

It isn’t just poetry that has this function, of course; arguably, all art forms — music, visual art, film, the novel — can do the same. There is perhaps something about poetry, however, especially short-form poetry, that does so in a particularly unique way, and I think that is to do with the intensely deliberate, conscious nature of it — you can analyse a poem to often the same level of depth as you can a novel or a play, but poetry is so concise and (usually) digestible that it tends to present its questions far more clearly and urgently. So: what actually is poetry? Well, it’s a usually short-form text full of conscious decisions about language and structure. But it is also a means through which we can be constantly refreshing and challenging our perceptions of the abstract workings of the world around us. It allows us to concisely explore complex questions. It gives us answers — not answers that we find, but that we create ourselves, based on what we have available to us. There may be no real answer to the question of ‘what is poetry’, but it remains something that can be so intensely relevant to each of us in the world that we live in: through it, we make our own answers.