“In art, you’re free.”

One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to be countless poets, poetry awards, and poets with awards. How, then, do we define great poets or poetry? He gave me permission to answer publicly, on this site.

In doing so, I first have to admit that I do not feel qualified in any way to define great poets or poetry. I can really only comment on the poets and poems that are great within me. I have been giving this some thought, and have identified a few common characteristics.

Voltaire is reputed to have said, “Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.” That’s a bit harsh. But I am inclined to agree that poetry does involve its own kind of “truth.” It is not a factual truth, but more what Seamus Heaney called “a ring of truth within the medium itself,” since, according to Emily Dickinson, a poet “tells all the truth but tells it slant.” I also think poetic truth needs to be both new and moving in order to reach toward greatness.

Some would argue that newness, especially innovation in language, is all that matters. I think, instead, that innovation is actually a by-product of great poets seeking after new truths (which are often, in fact, old truths newly arranged). The quality of moving the reader in some way is, to me, essential. This does not need to involve an intense emotional outpouring. But if the reader is the same before and after reading the poem, then the reader has not been moved, and the poem can hardly be said to have fulfilled its potential for greatness.

Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz are two poets I think are great. Among other things, Heaney mostly wrote about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Milosz mostly wrote about occupied Poland during World War II. The combination of their position in history, and the profound ways in which they related to such difficult subject matter, make it clear why they were both awarded the Nobel Prize.

I believe there is an energy and intensity that comes with discovering poetry as a means to reconcile life’s difficulties, and then discovering how much one needs such reconciliation, or, at least, creative freedom. However, the drive to write does not necessarily require such epic circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote poems of remarkable ingenuity and skill in the midst of a repressive life as a Victorian spinster. In fact, I think that anyone sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of the world in which we live has all the encouragement necessary to seek the solace poetry can provide.

The most common characteristic I can identify among those poets I consider great is their absolute hunger for the freedom in art. It is this quality that galvanizes talent, effort, patience, endurance, and everything else I find inherent within those poets I most admire. It is true, as Marvin Bell points out, that in life we are not free, and even the most privileged life can be a burden. But in art, we are free, and this freedom, and the poetic truth that issues from this free space, can touch to others in ways that are great inside of them as well.

What is so great about this poet is that she can really turn a compact phrase. I have heard Emily Dickinson sneeringly called, “the undergraduate’s favorite poet” and at the same time critical giants like Harold Bloom consider her one of the greatest. Whether you think her poems are clever (in the worst sense of the word) or clever (in the best sense), the first four lines of this particular poem illustrate poetic thinking at its best.

What is so great about this poem, and especially the opening, is that it is wound tight with creative energy. The meaning is fairly straightforward, but the resonance it leaves with us in just a few words is impactful. Most of the impact comes from one of the most fundamental functions poetry satisfies psychologically: to simultaneously convince us that we understand what is going on and at the same time leave some part of us feeling that we do not completely understand. In this case, the effect is rendered mostly through playing on the difference between light and heavy words.

To illustrate this point, consider the effect if the fourth line ended with “cathedral songs” instead of tunes. It’s a more boring poem. More literal. Even (perhaps especially) if we reworked it to rhyme. Why? Because the stroke of genius in the use of “tunes” is that at least one of its meaning is as a light word–meaning something between a song and a jingle. This is somewhat out of place–if we really thought about it–in a cathedral. But we do not stop to think about it. Because, besides being aided by the natural sense of “rightness” a rhyme creates, the poem has also set up a precedent for the use of words with possible “light” valences in an otherwise heavy situation.

Consider the following dissection:

light
slant
light
afternoon
tune

heavy
certain
winter
oppresses
heft
cathedral

The “light” words are slightly outnumbered and out of place. But only slightly–because they hold enough literal sense in the context of the grammar and syntax of the poem as to be passable in furthering that literal meaning. More than passable, they are interesting, because their ulterior meanings make them slightly strange.

The entire poem, in fact, is a remarkable example (as is much of Dickinson’s work) of the importance of strangeness to poetry. Good poems often say what they mean while lightly scattering ulterior motives and messages throughout the poem. Or if not messages, at least unusual or interesting relationships.

Every word has many charges to it, and so, besides sending our mind in the main direction, we find our minds rapidly stimulated by the cumulative effect of these additional meanings. The overall effect is a sense of delight, or scope, or fascination with a poem. And the best ones, read over and over, have the same electrochemical effect upon us every time.

Perhaps a little more about that next Monday.