Apparently it's pleasant to me, for me, to ramble on (sometimes at great length) about the character of poetry in general, poetry in the abstract. I've been doing it for many years on various blogs. Maybe the pleasure is due in part to the lack of pressure. There's no specific artistic object or product involved; no magazine editor out there to say, "Sorry, this does not fit our current needs"; no critic or professor ready with a reprimand or a call to order. The process is a kind of discursive daydreaming.
There was something in my run-through of those older posts here, from 14 years ago, that stuck with me tonight.
First of all, the suggestion that poetry in every case depends on, dangles there glittering from, beauty – some experience or intuition of same.
And following from that, the idea that you can't really grasp the character of poetry without seeing that it is a multidimensional – maybe tripartite? – phenomenon. I mentioned three facets or aspects that interact :
1) the maker of the poem, who undergoes or "suffers" the sensibility or experience of an encounter with the beautiful – with beauty, in some form, some dimension.
2) the poem itself, which is a kind of response to this encounter : a reenactment, a memorialization, a mimesis, a dramatization of the passion – the passio, the suffering – of this event.
3) the reception of the poem in the life-experience, the sensibility, of the reader … all the concrete richness, complexity, and unknowable mystery of a person's ordinary life into which the poem, the work of art, makes itself felt.
Of course all this kind of abstract discursive explanatory prose is instantly boring... "murder to dissect" and all that. But I mentioned some other things in in relation to this abstract pattern, that might bear further thought : I mean in regard to Orpheus as the "figure of the poet" – of poetry itself coming to reflective or self-reflexive consciousness in this mythical person. And how the mythical cruxes of the story – the singing that brings healing and joy to Nature itself, the quest to rescue Eurydice from Hades, the later murder/sacrifice by the Maenads – amount to a ritual dramatization of this idea of Beauty suffered in experience : an exaltation for which the poem is a kind of evidence or testimony.
Aside : I'm looking for an experience of poetry beyond the glare of the obvious, or the fashionable trumpeting of self-expression, or the manufactured virtue of opinion. I'm looking for something oblique and hard to find (but beautiful).
