The Use Of Poetry

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-Poetry is universal as language and almost as ancient
-It has been used by the most primitive and cultured peoples -in all ages and places, it has been written and read/listened to by all classes/types of people
-Why does poetry appeal to people? -it has given pleasure -people have read it, listened to it, or recited it because they liked it and it gave them enjoyment -it has also been regarded as something central to existence -has unique value to the fully realized life -we are better off for having -without it, we would be spiritually impoverished
-What is poetry defined as? -initially: a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely that does ordinary language -what are the uses of language? -commonest use: to communicate information -to say what time it is, that we liked a movie, etc. -this is the practical use of language because it helps us with the ordinary business of living -to bring us a sense and perception of life and to widen and sharpen our contacts with existence -this is why novels, short stories, plays, and poems are written -their concern is experience -they fulfill our inner need to live more deeply and fully and with greater awareness, to know the experience of others, and to understand our own experience better -poets take their own experiences and select, combine, and reorganize, creating new experiences for their readers, in which readers can participate and from which they may gain a greater awareness and understanding of their world -literature can be used as a gear for stepping up the intensity and increasing the range of our experience, and as a glass for clarifying it -this is the literary use of language -language as an instrument of persuasion or argument -in advertisements, sermons, political speeches, some poems -but the three types of language: practical, literary, and argumentative overlap -some written works perform two or more of these functions -effectiveness of communicating experience is the one essential criterion for any poem aspiring to be literary -example: eagles -you can look up eagles in an encyclopedia and find out practical information -but to find the soul, you must turn to literature -an article analyzes the experience of eagles, but a poem synthesizes the experience -2 approaches to experience complement each other: scientific and literary -it can be argued that the two types are equally valuable -literature exists to communicate significant experience (significant because it is concentrated and organized) -its function is not to tell us about experience but to allow us to participate in it -it allows us to live more deeply and with greater awareness through the imagination -broadens our experience by making us acquainted with a range of experiences with which we otherwise would not have had contact -deepens our experience by making us feel more poignantly and more understandingly the everyday experiences we all have -using this concept of poetry, we can avoid two limiting approaches -do not always look for a moral or lesson -this approach sees poetry as a sugarcoated pill: a wholesome truth or lesson put into pretty words -poetry is not always beautiful -the function of poetry is sometimes to be ugly -beauty and philosophical truth are two aspects of
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