The Art of Poetry
Poetry is a literary work that uses the aesthetic qualities of language. Unlike ordinary writing, poems do not use the semantic or notional properties of language. Poems use words to appeal to listeners and are not intended to be read like ordinary text.
Poems use word association, imagery, and the musical properties of language. They use repetition and assonance to achieve incantation and musical effects. Using techniques, such as compression and condensation, poetry evokes ideas and emotions in readers’ minds. Poetry stands out because of the incorporation of all of these effects.
How does poetry qualify to be an art? Like other art forms, such as dance, sculpture, painting, and music, poetry has methods, practices, and tools that define it and a history that informs it.
Poetry is not the domain of everyone with a pen and paper. Writers must learn to use complex tools, techniques, variations, and aspects of history to write poetry. Writing quality poems takes skill and experience. It differs from other types of writing. Most texts such as newspapers and novels don’t have poetic styling. They are written in prose, and not much attention is given to line breaks and the arrangement of words. In poetry, however, words are arranged to sound beautiful and to share a message. Poems can also carry alternate meanings.
Notably, the main difference between poetry and ordinary writing is the attention given to the final piece. Incorporating tone, structure, form, and word choice into a poem helps deliver a poet’s intended message.
To understand a poem, readers need to “read between the lines.” Poems puzzle the mind and are drafted in ways that are appealing to the eyes. The quality, expression, production, and realm of poetry can be appealing and beautiful according to the aesthetic principles of its readers.
Relationships exist among music, sculpture, painting, and poetry. Specifically, poetry and painting are closely related. They share elements such as structure, harmony, and rhythm. The same way people speak of compositional balance in a painting, poets talk about the rhyming of words in a poem.
However, the visual appeal of a painting is immediate, portrayed by colors, images, and forms. But a poem communicates subtly. The senses decode the meaning and message as the reader moves through the poem. The reader does not decipher the content until the end of a poem or even much later. Despite this, poetry brings images to life.
Poems, painting, music, and sculpture have unique ways of combining components to create art. All of these forms of art use layering to produce final pieces. For instance, harmonies enhance a melody in music, while different layers of color make a picture in a painting. Similarly, layering in poetry is achieved through rhetoric, form, meter, and sound to create an image or feeling.
It is widely thought that all poems have to rhyme, follow a definite format, or have a deep meaning. They do in most cases, but such thinking is limiting. Poetry is a form of expression characterized by many tools and is constantly evolving.
Originally published at http://www.behance.net on October 6, 2021.
