Writer: Mathirakshana R
Editor: Mehul Shah
Illustrator: Shravan Bakkiyaraj
“ Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality. “
~ Emily Dickinson
This poem is truly one of a kind; for it ends like it’s stretching out to you, the reader, wanting you to finish the lines of it, reeling you in close and holding you by its poetic hands- Ah, well. Let me stop before it gets into the TMI zone (see what I did there; by ending with a dash *smirking in aesthetic*).
Poetry may be the last thing we think of when we think of aesthetics; it may just be considered a collection of words strung together to create a greater meaning.
Honestly, it’s a culmination of lettered gems assuming an identity in the guise of imagery, spun in a flowy structure to evoke emotions out of us. Pretty much the same idea as before, just made more fancy and sophisticated, yeah?
That’s what poetry goes out to achieve- create images in the reader’s brain of a simple idea conjectured out of a sudden burst of creativity or a lot of scratching out and rewriting.
When we talk about the aesthetics of poetry, we must sift through the structures of different poems.
In the poetic universe, we have haikus, villanelles, erasure or popularly known as blackout poetry, free verse, etc. the list is endless and vast.
For example, when we look at haikus,which are three-line Japanese origin poems, they look like this, here’s an example-
“A World of Dew” by Kobayashi Issa
A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.
The placement of the words; the rhyme scheme of it all (five-seven-five); the starting letter of each line being 'a'; the cyclical ending to the poem. All these are little details of analysis we can point out after having read it. However, there is the argument of whether, at first glance, we notice all these details. Surely the first thing we do is read it, let the depth sink into our soul and then probably re-read it again.
Then there’s an example of villanelles are nineteen lines, with a very specific rhyme scheme, usually with intense subjects:
Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)
There's so much immediate appeal when we read this as the alignment; the different punctuation made use of here- like semicolons, parentheses, hyphens- add to the overall weight of the poem, and the word choices here are extremely powerful, immediately goading us to picture something our brain chalks up vaguely upon reading them.
Then we got blackout poetry, a new and emerging art form that is a combo of the visual arts and poetry brought to life by creating something new from already existing written material through the erasure of words and highlighting only a couple (quite sustainable, no? *winks suggestively*). An example would be:
Didn’t ever think something this artsy could be created? Blackout poetry is the answer to aesthetically pleasing forms of poetry, for it focuses on attracting the reader by the magnetic effect of the artwork. Our eyes tend to linger on pieces like these more and increase the memorability of the piece now.
And there’s the free verse that spoken word artists play and tinker a lot with and achieve greatness by doing so. They can perfectly embody the emotions, feelings and images they want to get through by writing their piece, clinching their poetic license tight (which is a real thing, by the way!) and getting permission to deviate from regular syntax.
When we relate the aesthetics of poetry to society, we must take note of what Theodor W. Adorno, a German philosopher, says in his book, Notes to Literature, “Immersion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric poem to the status of something universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed’’ and “ Universalism is social in nature.’’
They even say that the “Social interpretation of lyric poetry as of all works of art may not focus on the so-called social perspective or the social interest of the works of their authors; instead, it must discover how the entirety of the society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is then manifested in the work of art, in what way it remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it”.
Something that affects one so much; an experience or in the plural, that pushes you over the edge, to let it out as art is necessary for the poet, and will help someone somewhere around the world to relate with it in their way, and has a social aspect laced in every bit of it. There are poems from every little chunk of history that denote thoughts, perspectives and angles of that time, giving way for us to openly interpret it, and view the world from that social lens.
In conclusion, poetry does have inklings of aesthetic appeal, but it is not extremely important or the only factor that draws readers in. Research has stated that mental imagery is what pulls people in more. Blackout poetry, however, may be an exception, for it’s a combination, so it can draw people in either way, no matter what catches their eye first.
Let me leave you with a thought-provoking quote:
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” —June Jordan
References:-
2. Communications, N. W. (n.d.). What Gives Poetry Its Aesthetic Appeal? New Research Has Well-Versed Answer. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/november/what-gives-poetry-its-aesthetic-appeal--new-research-has-well-ve.html
3. Livni, E. (2022, July 20). Scientists identify precisely why the best poems are pleasing. Quartz. https://qz.com/quartzy/1142306/scientists-identify-precisely-why-the-best-poems-are-pleasing
4. Voutiritsas, T. (2021, July 21). 10 Vivid Haikus to Leave you Breathless. Read Poetry. https://www.readpoetry.com/10-vivid-haikus-to-leave-you-breathless/
5. Witty, M. (2022, July 1). This Is Why I Decided to Create Beautiful Blackout Poetry. Medium. https://medium.com/koinonia/this-is-why-i-decided-to-create-beautiful-blackout-poetry-ff6dba27f9be
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