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EMOTION AND INTELLECT IN POETRY

For a few pages, I would like to re-don my professorial cap (you know, the square one with the tassel) and posit two poles from which poetry may start: emotion and intellect. There are, of course, many other ways to discuss poetics, but these two seem at the moment most relevant. But before the discussion, two assertions:

Neither approach is right.

Neither approach is wrong.

Most poetry would in fact fit nicely on a continuum between extremes, and it is perhaps impossible to write a piece that emanates exclusively from one or the other. But for the purposes of discussion, let’s begin there.

Poetry of Emotion draws most strongly, obviously, from the depths of the poet’s emotions: love, fear, loneliness, hatred. Such poetry has as a primary intention recreating that emotion, in many cases privately and personally; readers become in essence adjuncts to the process, at times even irrelevant to it. The poem is directed inward, to the poet’s core. It becomes a means of emotional adjustment, a way to extract a particular emotional state and express it directly.

Such poetry relies little on poetic conventions and greatly on experience. The poet speaks directly, often in first person, often alluding to private experiences readers are neither expected nor invited to share. In some instances, a specific, single reader might serve as audience—particularly in poems of love or loss—but more commonly even that reader is peripheral to the expression of deep and often painful emotion.

Such basics of written communication as grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure rank low on the poet’s scale of priorities, sometimes even perceived as hindering the ‘honest’ expression of emotion. Revision becomes antithetical to the purposes of the poem; to hold the poem up to scrutiny, to alter its white-hot rhythms and diction would be to diminish the authenticity of its emotional content. Such poeticisms as image, simile, metaphor, or symbol occur only tangentially, as it were, as by-products of the poet’s need to allow the emotion to surface.

Poetry of Intellect, on the other hand, relies, equally obviously, on intellect; not on reason or rationality, per se, but on the conscious manipulation of them. The poem becomes a puzzle to create and to interpret. The poet becomes distanced in the sense that words become means to an end, tools by which to create a preconceived artifact.

Poetic conventions become the driving force behind the construct. Image and simile may occur, but more usually the more rigidly logical, objective tropes predominate: metaphor, with its conscious awareness and manipulation of similarities and differences between unexpectedly juxtaposed objects; and symbol, with its equal if not greater requirement of cerebral engagement to state effectively an idea not in fact present in the poem.

Such poems exploit the possibilities of form to the utmost, either traditional forms, including requirements of meter and rhyme, word or syllable count; or nonce forms in which free-verse lines express preconceived structures. Language similarly becomes a tool for puzzle-making and -solving, with acrostics, anagrams, palindromes, and other related techniques at times subordinating sense and meaning.

Again, I’m considering here extreme polarities possible in poetry. Most, if not all poetry, lies on the continuum between extremes; and much of the greatest poetry clusters near the center.

However, there is a point to be made by discussing these polarities. Much of the apparent discord that arise between poets and respondents, between poets and poets, may result from individuals not differentiating between two essentially antithetical purposes for writing.

I tend toward intellectual poetry, for example; it bothers me, and for me detracts substantially from a poem’s effectiveness, to see misspellings, grammatical infelicities, awkward or strained syntax (particularly in service of an equally awkward or strained rhyme). Form frequently seems preferable to free verse, since it automatically creates an intellectual challenge that I appreciate—how to communicate specific ideas, images, and, yes, even emotions, within the constraints of pre-existing line or stanzaic expectations. At the same time it provides relatively objective criteria for assessing poems: how well do they perform within those expectations. My own work tends to be formal…and at times it tends to be dispassionate, distanced, cold.

On Poetry As a Façade Behind Which the Essence Lurks

Meter comes easily. English tends to

Shift and swirl in rhythmic fall-then-rise.

Syllables allow themselves (almost) no

Hesitance. Sounds link in subtle ways

But can be tracked and traced across crisp lines,

Arrows drawn if needed to make clear

How “m” persists, or “l,” what strengths it gains

By repetition. What remains to mar

The texture of a piece, to hinder

Transformation from mere craft to art

(If one can hope for such in fonder

Thoughts) is that oblique, intrinsic part,

That revelatory, quintessential goal:

The power and the passion and the soul.

Others poets, however, equally if not more proficient and imaginative poets, tend toward emotional poetry. For them free verse is often preferable to form since it allows for, if not invites openly, overt expression of emotion. Niceties of grammatical conventions can be overlooked in favor of intensity, authenticity, excitement, and directness. Evaluating such poems becomes itself an act of emotion, of subjectivity: Do I like this poem? At the most distant extreme, that question might frequently supersede a more difficult question: Why do I like this poem?

There may be, as noted in the beginning of this consideration, many other ways to discuss poetry. But regardless of other options, it may be helpful to keep a couple of questions in mind when we approach a poem. What does the poet’s choice to write a sonnet, or a haiku, or meter and rhyme, or stripped-down free-verse suggest about why the poet wrote this particular poem? And what can we therefore legitimately expect to encounter when we enter it? Taking a moment to identify a poem as essentially emotion-oriented or intellect-oriented may make the experience of reading poems more beneficial, more constructive, and ultimately more enjoyable.