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The Power Of Poetry
Like music, it has a language of its own that defies single meaning
I saw something in the news today about a new audio dramatisation of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I am not so familiar with what some consider as his greatest work, although I’m a huge fan of The Waste Land, Prufrock and Preludes, mainly because I had to study them for a while. Of course, this could have gone the opposite way but fortunately it was the right time in my life to appreciate them. Yet ask me to sum up what these works are about and I would struggle. I am no poet, and certainly know very little about formal poetry appreciation. Though to ask what any poem is about maybe missing the point. In the same way that asking what a piece of music is about may not be the most important or interesting question.
Poetry and music are similar in this way. They have a language of there own that goes beyond prose or the spoken word. The most obvious similarities are with the rhythm and rhymes of poetry, the sounds the words make when placed together in a particular order, that echoes the pleasure we receive from hearing music. Both music and poetry are able to speak about things that can only be properly expressed in their form. If the whole meaning of a poem can be definitively summed up in prose then why not do so in the first place? What would be the point of the poem? At…
