TRADITIONAL POETRY

Introduction
Poets and workshop conveners dread the question, but it can hardly be avoided. What exactly is poetry? Dictionaries generally offer something like: the expression or embodiment of beautiful or elevated thought, imagination or feeling in language adapted to stir the imagination and the emotions.
But if this expresses the expectations of the man in the street, it doesn't describe the aims of most poets working today, nor take us far in appreciating the variety of past work.

Traditional Poetry
Traditionalists generally believe that poems give enduring and universal life to what was merely transitory and particular. Through them, the poet expresses his vision, real or imaginative, and he does so in forms that are intelligible and pleasurable to others, and likely to arouse emotions akin to his own. Poetry is language organized for aesthetic purposes. Whatever else it does, poetry must bear witness, must fulfill the cry: 'let not my heart forget what mine eyes have seen.' A poem is distinguished by the feeling that dictates it and that which it communicates, by the economy and resonance of its language, and by the imaginative power that integrates, intensifies and enhances experience. Poems bear some relationship to real life but are equally autonomous and independent entities that contain within themselves the reason why they are so and not otherwise. Unlike discourse, which proceeds by logical steps, poetry is intuited whole as a presentiment of thought and/or feeling. Workaday prose is an abbreviation of reality: poetry is its intensification. Poems have a transcendental quality: there is a sudden transformation through which words assume a particular importance. Like a bar of music, or a small element in a holographic image, a phrase in a poem has the power to immediately call up whole ranges of possibilities and expectations. Art is a way of knowing, and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that knowledge. Poetry is an embodiment of human values, not a kind of syntax. True symbolism in poetry allows the particular to represent the more general, not as a dream or shadow, but as the momentary, living revelation of the inscrutable.
The poet's task is to resurrect the outer, transient and perishable world within himself, to transform it into something much more real. He must recognize pattern wherever he sees it, and build his perceptions into poetic form that has the coherence and urgency to persuade us of its truth: the intellectual has to be fused with the sensuous meaning. All poets borrow, but where good poets improve on their borrowing, the bad debase. The greatness of the poet is measurable by the real significance of the resemblances on which he builds, the depth of the roots in the constitution, if not of the physical world, then of the moral and emotional nature of man.
Poetry can be verse or prose. Verse has a strong metrical element. An inner music is the soul of poetry. Poetry withers and dries out when it leaves music, or at least some imagined music, too far behind. The diction of poetry is a fiction, neither that of the speaker nor the audience. Without its contrivance poetry is still possible, but is immensely poorer. Subtly the vocabulary of poetry changes with the period, but words too familiar or too remote defeat purpose of the poet. {1}