Article in Stretton Focus, February 2012
A poet is someone who puts words together with a creative imagination. Words are assembled in a way that is designed to stimulate the thoughts and stir up the emotions of any reader.
The names of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning will spring to mind as being poets whose words were learned in school and still remembered. What they wrote, we called poems. Many and varied are the ways these poems are put together.
Some are written using a fixed metre and with rhyming couplets, which make them easier to remember. There are fourteen line English sonnets; seventeen syllable Japanese haiku; and some readers may even know what a ‘clerihew’ is.
There is blank verse, and irregular verse in many forms – but where is the poetry?
Of course, it’s in the poem! But not in any visible or objective way. You could say that it is the ‘spiritual essence’ of the poem, which only appears when the reader makes a personal response to what they have read.
When the spirit of the reader is ‘activated’ by the spirit of the poem, that is when the poetry comes into being, with a life and energy of its own. The reader can be inspired by the poetry, getting absorbed in it; uplifted and ‘carried away’; and even experiencing a sense of ‘oneness’ with it.
And for any who are struggling to understand the concept of God, here is a useful analogy. God is in the world, like poetry is in the poem; and with the same invitation to discover, and become ‘one’.
Donald Horsfield