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by Bradley Power
Managing Editor
Poetry, the careful arrangement of language into poems, is a difficult topic, especially among teenagers. Every year without fail, we dredge through poetry units in our English classes, reviewing the same old figurative language—metaphors, onomatopoeia, similes, personification, alliteration, rhyme, the whole shebang. We also wail like whales, woefully wishing—attempting—to recite, and write, wan poems against our wavering wills.
As one might assume, the vast majority of students at this school do not enjoy poetry units. Writings like my attempt at alliteration above are not appealing to them. Maybe they regard poetry as stupid or useless. Perhaps they’d rather learn or speak of other things. Most likely, they just don’t feel comfortable with poetry, especially reciting it in front of all their classmates and friends.
In defiance of all these erroneous assumptions, I’d like to make a case in poetry’s favor. I hope that I can shed a new light on what it is, its purpose, and why it is the niftiest thing to be interested in. To start, I’d like to list some of the most popular arguments against poetry, and then I’ll go into each of them in more detail. People call poetry dead, uninteresting, difficult, and unrelatable.
Ok, here we go: poetry is not a dead art form. Yes, the vast majority of famous poets are long dead, but we have to remember that poetry, like any art, is at its core defined by how it is remembered. Da Vinci is very dead, but the “Mona Lisa” has become the most famous painting of all time, so he lives on. Beethoven, who died quite young at 56, lives on through the immediately distinguishable notes to his 5th Symphony (Bum bum bum BUUUUUUM…. Bum bum bum BUUUUUUUUUUM), or the timeless “Ode to Joy” from his 9th. These men are honored and their art appreciated today, even despite their deadness. Likewise, poems like “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” or even “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” by Shakespeare still influence the colloquialisms of our society. In addition, there are plenty of modern poets with real writings about humanity’s current worldviews—Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, and Carol Ann Duffy, to name a few—who are definitely not dead to us yet.
To the claim that poetry is not interesting, I would like to put forth one example of a poem that has an interesting aspect: “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley. The poem is one of determination, with the speaker challenging fate in a very cool way, and ends with the famous lines “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”
When Henley wrote this gritty, death-defying masterpiece, he was in the hospital with a terrible bout of tuberculosis. Years before, at only 16, he’d had to have his left leg amputated because of a similar infection, and at the time of this poem’s writing, it was looking like his right leg might have needed to go as well. Go read the poem to see for yourself how interesting a poem can be, with only a little context.
Poetry, by nature, is a strange creature. Poets tear the fabric of language in order to make it do what they want—poetry is almost like a kind of necromancy for words, ironic in that it defies all conventions of the English language, but is still considered to be one of its highest forms.
While, of course, poems can be confusing or complicated, I’d like to point something out—anything unfamiliar is confusing. To me, a through and through nerd, the way a football team runs plays is not only confusing, but intimidating, because I don’t understand it! Likewise, teenagers, daunted by poetry, are only scared because they lack a precise understanding of what it is.
How do we gain understanding? By experience. If I had the guts, I could try and learn to play football, and over time, I would eventually learn how to play and watch the game in a more knowledgeable way. For our scared teens, all they need to do is try a little harder and spend a little more time on poetry, and they will then become more comfortable, which will lead to a greater ease of understanding.
To finish, I’d like to shoot down the notion that poetry is unrelatable. First of all, the sheer magnitude of poems out there contends with any generalized statement like that, for no two poems are the same. Even someone like me, who reads poems for fun, has only scratched the surface of the available material to experience.
Despite that, I myself have found several poems that I relate to on a very deep level. For example, the poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman is to me a picture-perfect snapshot of myself from a time not so long ago, when I struggled ceaselessly to find social connection. Gratefully, I’ve moved past those challenges, and the poem’s meaning still stands strong in my mind as a reminder for me of what I used to be.
Just as each of us is a unique, special, and radiant individual; so is each poem a disparate, exceptional, and outstanding work of literary art. I promise that there is at least one poem out there for each and every one of us to relate to. If you don’t believe me, hit me up. I’ll find you one.
