The difficulty of thinking about poetry as a kind of writing is the temptation to define it as words put into meter or some other structure. This tells us very little and is immediately contradicted by forms like prose poems. We already understand that poetry is bigger than verse. What we also know, however, is that poems are intended to be received differently than prose. We recognize their emotional and intellectual purpose is somehow different from what we receive from other uses of language, but we’re not very good at figuring out exactly how that purpose is different.
There are other places in our lives where we find similar difficulties, the most obvious being the definition of love. It is useless to define it as “affection” or some other synonym. What we experience when we love someone is an expansion of how we think of ourselves. The identity we know as “I” changes and becomes larger and includes the person who is loved. If the love is reciprocated, the person loved expands as well to include the other. Of course, experiencing someone else as part of yourself has a lot of ways to go wrong. Other people are not part of us, even if we feel that they are. The friction between what we have made part of ourselves and another real person who is not part of us can become a source of conflict and even violence. This figures in the plot of at least half the operas I’ve seen.
I want to suggest that poems aspire to this process of love. Perhaps that is one reason love has been so often the subject of poetry. Poems are intended to become part of the reader’s self and to enlarge that self. This is far from the more-limited intent of discourse. We read a poem to experience what it embodies. If the poet is good, we get a sense of it. If the poet is exceptional, we have that experience of the poem and are changed by it. We become larger as selves, perhaps even more sympathetic to others.
This may explain as well why so many entities in history have imprisoned poets. Oppressive governments need to be able to limit the sympathies of the persons they govern. Love must only be directed to the state or the figure who embodies the state. The oppressive state uses punishment and fear to become part of its subjects’ identities. The king or dictator or president-for-life is always a jealous god.
Fiction also seeks to extend the sympathies of its readers, and novelists may also find themselves despised by oppressors for the same reasons as poets. What is special about poetry is it puts an embodied consciousness into words in a very focused and easily transportable way. It can move through a country like a virus, expanding the identities of those who read it. Poems are put out into the world to become part of others, to be absorbed into selves just as those selves absorb the identities of those whom they love.
I am not suggesting that poetry is a form of revolution. Auden was right in his elegy for Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen but is “a way of happening.” Poetry’s changes to the human mind or the individual self are subtle, and there is no guarantee that readers of poetry are more humane or sympathetic to others. Regardless, this does not lessen the aspiration of each poem that our species has written.
Often when I’ve spoken with students or readers about their favorite poems, they use the word “love.” There are poems we love, poems that have made us who we are, poems that have changed us. This process of change is the goal of poetry.