Is Beauty the Function of Poetry?

[Louanne Learning]

First thread of the new forum!!

Let's begin with some discussion surrounding a quote from Edgar Allen Poe's The Philosophy of Composition (which you can read for free at the link):

Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem.

For Poe, beauty is the one true province or function of poetry, the genre most able to inspire “intense and pure elevation of the soul.”

I have to admit, I don’t know how he defined beauty. I think even ugly truths can be beautiful simply because they are true.

(Conversely, he saw “the excitement of the heart” as best attained through prose writing.)

Was Poe right? If so, wherein lies the beauty in poetry?

 

[murff]

It depends on what you mean by beauty. If beauty means that which pleases the eye, ear, touch, etc. then I would say it is limited. If beauty means these things as well as pleasure, then it is still limited. But there is a more comprehensive view of beauty which involves truth. Now I don't propose to know the truth and I don't think anyone does. But we definitely know something through our experience and all of that contributes to our understanding of truth. But I would suggest that truth comes to us in fleeting moments and flashes of exceptional awareness that are probably unsustainable for long periods. Truth is also elusive. This is what I think the province of poetry is. There is beauty in it. There is also pain and frustration at our inability to sufficiently articulate it or to fully understand how it affects us. There is also truth in suffering, which most people would hardly call beautiful. Beauty can be complicated. Sometimes it's beyond our grasp. Which is why I think that poetry should not try to explain things, rather offer glimpses of those extraordinary moments that are impossible to hang on to.

 

[Louanne Learning]

It depends on what you mean by beauty.

Very much so. Poe considered it an effect, not a quality. And the effect he wrote of was an elevation of the "soul" (not of intellect, not of the heart)

Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes … that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem.

But for him, the greatest beauty was found in gloom and sorrow (calling to mind the notion of the suffering artist):

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

I admit I am having trouble differentiating elevation of the "soul" and of the "heart"

But there is a more comprehensive view of beauty which involves truth.

This would be my philosophy, too. To me, truth is the highest beauty. But Poe would disagree:

Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul.

Now I don't propose to know the truth and I don't think anyone does.

Here, it depends on what kind of truth you're talking about. Everyone knows their own subjective truths, and isn't that what we use as our inspiration for any work of art?

There is also truth in suffering which most people would hardly call beautiful.

Again - depends on your definition of beauty. If, in our suffering, we become more fully human, that is a beautiful thing.

Which is why I think that poetry should not try to explain things but just offer glimpses of those extraordinary moments that are impossible to hang on to.

Love this sentiment.

 

[murff]

I avoid the word "soul" in poetry because no one really knows what it means. It's an abstraction and, frankly, a short cut for something more specific that would likely make a far better poem if it was articulated or even aluded to through concrete imagery.

I admit I am having trouble differentiating elevation of the "soul" and of the "heart"

 

[Louanne Learning]

I avoid the word "soul" in poetry because no one really knows what it means. It's an abstraction

Yeah, as the ancient Greeks said, something risked in battle, and lost in death

 

[Altani]

I think Poe is, to put it a bit coarsely, a bit full of shit. There are plenty of poems that serve functions beyond beauty-- as a emotional release of anger, for instance, or as comedic relief. Anytime someone tries to define the regions of what is or isn't art, or what art "should" be, they start running into grey areas. It feels like a sort of gatekeeping/censorship, and I'm a fan of neither in most but the most extreme cases.

 

[murff]

I think Poe is, to put it a bit coarsely, a bit full of shit. There are plenty of poems that serve functions beyond beauty-- as a emotional release of anger, for instance, or as comedic relief. Anytime someone tries to define the regions of what is or isn't art, or what art "should" be, they start running into grey areas. It feels like a sort of gatekeeping/censorship, and I'm a fan of neither in most but the most extreme cases.

Poe may be America's favoutite poet but I suspect that's because he's the only poet most Americans can think of when asked who their favorite poet is. I like Nick Flynn. He has a sense of humour and a taste for tragedy. I don't know if that is beauty or not but he writes great poetry. I also think Diane Suess is great and Rita Dove and August Kleinzahler.

 

[Also]

Beauty?

Emotion, rather. The only dead poetry is that which evokes none.

 

[Le Panda du Mal]

I agree with Poe, if one does not cling to a restrictive or superficial concept of beauty. And I think it's enough to read Poe's own work to know that he took delight in much more than what would conventionally be classed as beautiful. He is a great contributor to the cause of expanding our notions of beauty and reintegrating the despised. Lautreamont, who wrote, "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" was a reader of Poe.

 

[Fantastical]

It can be although there are many types of things that can make a poem good.

 

[JLT]

Poetry, I think, should be beautiful, but it doesn't necessarily have to be pretty.

For me, beauty is an appreciation of some aspect of any art that strikes me as increasing my awareness of the subject. If I look at a piece of art and evokes a "Wow" response, snaring my attention, I would call that beauty. I look at it and feel that it would be hard to improve on it without tampering with its message, beauty has been achieved. (And all art is message, but that's another topic.)

I avoid the word "soul" in poetry because no one really knows what it means. It's an abstraction and, frankly, a short cut for something more specific that would likely make a far better poem if it was articulated or even aluded to through concrete imagery.

Nobody really knows what "beauty" means, either. But "soul" for me implies some sort of spiritual aspect of anything. When a person dies, the soul goes, and the meat is left. When the "soul" goes out of an art, it no longer evokes the feeling of spiritual enrichment that it had before.

When I was working mainly with young African-Americans, I remember them debating the definition of "soul food" or "soul music." It was felt that, like jazz, it was undefinable and unquantifiable... you just knew it when you encountered it.

 

[Louanne Learning]

Poetry, I think, should be beautiful, but it doesn't necessarily have to be pretty.

Well said!

 

[Louanne Learning]

I spent some time this morning reading John Burroughs’ 1877 book – Birds and Poets – (read online for free at the link).

In it, he elaborates on many topics, including meditations on birds as represented in poetry, as well as nature, the human condition, genius and beauty. In the chapter on beauty, he writes of the dynamism, the ongoing-ness of the poetic endeavour, echoing Poe’s idea that beauty is an effect, not a quality:

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other the inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids,—as lime and iron,—any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion,—fluid humanity.

 

[defaux]

I agree that poetry should be beautiful, in the deeper sense as others have suggested. Perhaps a better word for how I consider it would be evocative. Not necessarily to make you think of the form or its subject as lovely and good, but to make you feel something, see something beyond the words.

Where I disagree with Poe is in this being exclusive to poetry. Maybe he doesn't quite say that, but it's in the implication that poetry is one thing and prose is another.

I know I approach from an angle that would be called literary, though I don't necessarily love all of what that word brings with it. But I consider there is beauty to be rendered in the artistic use of language itself, regardless of form. Prose can be, in my opinion, as beautiful, as evocative as poetry.

And so too can poetry excite. I confess may not fully appreciate Poe's meaning in that line, but considering some of his own work, like the Raven, which seems written for that express purpose. It feels a bit self contradictory.

 

[JLT]

For Poe, beauty is the one true province or function of poetry, the genre most able to inspire “intense and pure elevation of the soul.”

It's been said that poetry is "concentrated prose" ... the ability to say something in fewer words, or to add an unexpected dimension to words.

I find examples galore in popular song. Jackson Brown wrote:

"When you see through love's illusions, there lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool
So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger"

An ideal stranger, or a complete stranger? Both. A neat way of encapsulating the dual meanings of the word.

Or Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble:"

"These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky"

In the fifth line, "the way we look to" can be both "the way we appear to be" and "the way we turn our attention to." A neat trick, that.

I tried to do the same thing in this song:

https://writingforum.org/threads/all-over.724/