The concept of some poetry as a product linguistic naivety, either intentionally striven for, or as a result of unfamiliarity, of an attempt to learn a new language and in the process perceiving elements and structure not easily seen by a native speaker, is fascinating. Poetry as found art. Who is the poet, the language learner or the sophisticated linguist who rearranges in order to make visible insights experienced the language learner.
Poetry has been my life. I can remember a group of very young children, 6 or7 years old, who were encouraged to write poetry about their pets: "Oh Buddy how I love you! You can sleep in my bed every night!" It moved me to tears. The beauty that is simplicity and a form of honesty that is indistinguishable from kindness.
After many decades of writing and teaching I still have not found an adequate single definition of poetry. It's a word, a concept, as impossible to pin down as love or that special sadness one finds in Portugese, or the happy sadness so essential to Brasilian music, some of which is really poetry:
'A truchload of bricks in the soft morning light
the sound of a gun in the dead of the night
and the riverbank sings of the waters of March
It is the promise of Spring'
I think that great sophistication exists within some simple sentences because of images and associations, and genius:
"The apparition of these faces in a crowd
Petals on a wet black bough"
and Pound created someting that stunned me as a young student and continues to affect how I perceive external and internal reality.
And Chinese poetry, so complex that the words and the separate letters may mean very different things. Tu Fu, wo lived 1,300 years ago was a master, and his images sometimes shimmer like a distorted mirror:
"the moon like a clear mirror rises from the great void" But hidden in the pictographic script are other, more profound messages.
And the thoughs of well educated young British officers, scrawled on papers that were sometimes found in their blood soaked kits after their deaths, 19 year old captains whose poetry I taught for many years. Ispent some time, long ago, at a college in Oxford which had old style photographs of graduating classes on the walls, stiffly posed young men, classes of 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914, with their names written longhand in faded purple ink. Some years the great majority, most of them, had a small cross next to the boy's name indicating his death in the great war. No attempt at naivety here, in what they wrote, these dying children. Amost all of then cursed the war and cursed the political leaders who had sent them to a meaningless death in a foolish unnecessary war. How many are still buried in the soil of France and Belgium? I found it almost a moral duty to force these things down the throats ignorant unwilling undergraduates.
And then an assignment: "Blake's poem is not about a Tyger. It has another, far deeper meaning. It is a long complex question. Explain what it really is about" The key question for all we mortals, destined to die but having "an angels brain and seeing the ax from the first."
