When we write poetry, the best of it stems from our emotional state. Poetry and emotion are linked closely together by their mutual quality of drawing us into their world in a heartfelt way. The nature of writing poetry is to search deep within ourselves for what affects us the most in our lives: what we love, what we hate, an experience that touched us deeply, a profound awakening, or whatever brings us joy or sorrow.. For example, you might choose to write about how you felt on your wedding day or at high school graduation, at the birth of your first child or when a beloved parent died. Subjects such as these can spark deeply felt relatable emotions that prompt us to pick up the pen and write about them. The depth of the emotion can help determine the strength of the poem. The more powerful the feeling, the more effective the poem may be at sparking those emotions in the reader. Everyone goes through some of these events in life. What makes good poetry special is that it makes us feel the emotions connected with events described by the poet as if they were our own. The more the poet can make us feel what they feel, the more we will be drawn into their world.
Poets bring a unique viewpoint, their own perspective, to an experience. They make us see our life’s experiences in new and different ways that we never thought of before. Poetry gives us the soul of our subject, not just the objective analytical facts about it. It synthesizes our experience for us.
Consider this poem by the famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
“The Coming Of Wisdom With Time”
“Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.”
Many of us beyond a certain age may be able to relate to this poem. There is the metaphor here of wisdom and truth as being like a plant’s leaves and roots. Yeats poses the ideas that the bloom of youth must wither into old age before we attain wisdom and truth, and that in youth, we may waste time that could have been more wisely spent. Yeats makes us feel the angst, the lament for a lost perhaps misspent youth. Yet he is also celebrating the gain of wisdom and truth in the end. This is a poem about time and experience; Yeats makes us feel the emotions of exultation and lament, gain and loss.
My first book was created out of the strong emotion of grief over the deaths of my parents. I think I've reached my readers in large part because grief is so relatable and because loss is an overwhelming universal experience. We are all touched by it. But the positive experiences in our lives are no less powerful. For example, our hearts are also touched by a new grandchild being born into the world, or the marriage of a son or daughter, or a brother or sister. Emotions such as these are the lifeblood of a poet’s work. They transform all of us into both the poet and the reader experiencing the poem, the sender of the message, and the receiver.
In this pandemic time, we are isolated at home; we may find ourselves lonely and fearful, with lots of time on our hands. Some of us turn to writing poetry about our feelings and experiences; others are reading poetry to help release their emotions. Difficult times can cause us to look deep within ourselves and dredge up emotions that can inspire very powerful poems. We may also find comfort in reading the short condensed pieces of emotion that poetry delivers.
I hope that long past the time when this pandemic is gone, we will still turn to writing and reading poetry for comfort, identification, emotional catharsis, and an enlarged awareness of the universe and our lives.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you stay safe and well.
The poem is reprinted from:
Laurence Perrine (Southern Methodist University): “Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense.” second edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1974 (original copyright 1956)
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