The Value of Poetry

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order."

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For one of our first writing assignments of the year, we were required to list some of our strengths in writing.  Luckily for me, we also had to list some of our weaknesses.  I've always been extremely critical of my own work.  Whether it's been a passionate effort, taking weeks to complete, or an essay that I completed in record time and probably shouldn't even have bothered attempting.  I stated that my greatest weakness was my grasp of vocabulary when it comes to writing.  I've always had a fairly advanced vocabulary, but I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to draw upon it in my writing.  I too often fall back on 'however's' and 'although's' when my mind fails to locate a far more preferable term.  My largest goal for the year was to begin to fix this issue... venturing into new territory of diction could vastly improve my written work.

I never could have guessed how much the study of poetry could assist me in this.  Coleridge had a very important point, and I agreed with him before I even knew what he thought on the subject.  Poetry is defined by its profound depth, and this depth is forged with words.  In prose, substitution of a single word would have little effect, save on the flow of the sentence in which it is placed.  In poetry, however, each and every word is crucial to the poem as a whole.  This is true even when there is no meter or rhyme to worry about.  Each word is a cement holding the poem together.  

Take into consideration, for example, 'Suicide Note', by Langston Hughes:

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

In such a short poem, it is plainly obvious how important each word is to the meaning of the whole.  Replace 'Cool' with 'Cold', and the poem has become much more forwardly depressing than it should be. 'Cold' has just the same number of letters as 'Cool', and it only differs from the latter in one letter, subtracting an 'o' for a 'd'.  Even with this small change, the letter has changed the meaning of the entire poem.  

Poetry is a living, breathing thing, and every poem is constructed based on the same rules of language.  A poem can be broken down to individual letters, and like the individual genes and nucleotide pairs of a human, a single letters difference can mean life or death.  No level of complexity is too small to matter.

Our in-depth analysis of poetry is based on more than just word choice, but looking at this area has already had a marked effect on my ability to analyze my own writing.  My poetry hasn't suffered from it either, but I hesitate to concentrate too heavily on that area of writing at this point.  There will be times for that in the future, but I have miles to go before I sleep.