When I first heard we were doing poetry this semester, I was a little bit weary. I loved to read poetry and I could recite it fine, but when it comes to actually writing poetry, I wasn’t so confident. To me then, poetry felt like it had to be about big, emotive, real things. I felt I couldn’t do whatever topic I chose justice, or that writing a poem about something so huge would leave me vulnerable. If I’m being honest, the thought of having to put my feeling down on a piece of paper terrified me, but over the last 4 weeks, I’ve learnt that good poetry doesn’t have to be about topics so large, and while that still makes a good poem, smaller topics can still create an amazing poem.
I’ve also learnt that poetry has been around forever, and that poets hundreds of years ago, and maybe today as well, were a little bit eccentric. For example, there was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose husband, Robert Browning, had the same name as her son, Robert Barrett Browning, and she was one of the more normal ones. I mean there was Lord Byron who married his sister in the romantic era, and that’s just two examples, but what really is poetry, and what makes something a poem.
At the start of this unit we were asked to write a definition of poetry, this was mine,
“Poetry is artistically rendered words specifically using rhythm to express feelings of the poet or evoke emotion from the reader whilst reading it. It is something that is very important to the writer. Poetry affects every reader in a different way and cannot be defined on the whole as each poem evokes varying responses for each individual.”
One thing that still scares me a bit about poetry is picking a topic. As someone who wrote a literal poem above being indecisive last year, deciding, isn’t really my strong suit. It feels like I have to pick a topic that is perfect, and if it’s not, then the poem is going to be terrible. So many of the best poems were written from raw emotions, sorrow, desperation, and love. They all came from soldiers, always one step away from death, or parents, losing a child, or two people, hopelessly in love. They are all such powerful emotions, and it feels like the topic needs to be as well.
People have been turning to poetry for centuries, whenever something went wrong, or right there was always a poet there. Whenever there was something they didn’t understand, poetry seemed to put it in words. No matter how big or small a situation is, not matter what someone is feeling, there always seems to be a poem to fit it exactly. So why is it, that after all this time, we still turn to poetry in key moments of our lives?
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