POETRYREPAIRS.blog

general

What do poets do; what does poetry do?
I adhere to the philosophy of T.S. Eliot's teacher at Harvard. F.H. Bradley wrote that "each individual lives in a totally encompassing private universe from the experience of which we manifest institutions and perceptions." These manifestations are not full-blown worlds that replace what others live in and experience; rather they are tendencies toward unity, tendency toward difference, and tendencies toward harmony. Poets' writings create alternatives to established institutions and perceptions which readers follow or not, sometimes consciously or unconsciously as is the case with the tendency a poet creates. It is for this reason alone that Plato banned poets from his Republic: "poetry endangers the established order of the soul."
     Consider Milton who created Paradise Lost. His view of Satan was that of a charismatic leader of all those who turned away from God. This "negative deity" becomes for our dualistic society the epitome of all our dualisms: Satan and God, right or wrong, black and white, rich or poor, Democrat and Republican, although there are many who do not fit, do not match the dualisms, these dualisms have become institutions and perceptions--we speak of wealth, race, and politics among other things as being a choice between a negative and a positive though there are many degrees of these things.
     Likewise a poet who creates mostly women personae is a feminist writer demonstrating a tendency to a tendency toward unity in the social group "women", or by exclusion of males toward difference for the social group "women". Of course, even in gender we may recognize degrees of maleness/femaleness. Some poets, and I would argue the best of them, seek harmony. (This is merely an opinion).
      Basically, poets attack or support institutions and perceptions by a subliminal choice of tendencies which are adopted, adapted by readers or rejected. But poets also anchor their creations to established tendencies: there are Romantic, post structuralist, psychological, narrative, and formalist poets. All this is not with degrees of better and best but with  readers' perceptions of what is or is not "likeable" in poetry.
    What poets do and what poetry does is take from the experience of a totally self-contained universe and manifest to others certain tendencies toward socialinstitutions and social perceptions.