I wouldn't want to call any poetry bad, although there is certainly a difference between poetry of publishable quality and a novice poets first poems. Excellence in writing is, to a certain extent, subjective. Even the great poets are not universally loved and tend to go in and out of favor. I have never met any of the great poets whose works I love and I have not studied the lives of all of them, yet through their words I see new vistas independent of the man who wrote the words. "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold, for instance, speaks volumes to me. I don't need to know anything about Arnold himself to appreciate it. The stanza below is from memory so it may be wrong, forgive me if it is:
And we are here as on a darklng plain,
swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight,
where ignorant armies clash by night.
A poem should stand or fall because of its language. Like a flower, it stands alone, you don't need to know its genus or habitat to appreciate it. You look into it, admire it, perhaps smell its perfume, and if it intrigues you, by all means research it, but the research is secondary. Feeling, as E.E.Cummings said, is first.
Alexa |
