THE SOUL CRIES ALOUD FOR RELEASE INTO CHANGE AND THIS RELEASE IS THE HEART OF ARTISTIC FULFILMENT.
Andry-Andreja Jakus
Keats said that the poetry “should strike a reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Poetry does more than remind us of “what oft was thought, but ne’er do well expressed.”
As Whitehead suggests, poetry fertilizes the soul by creating entirely new insights.”
And Browning speaks of poetry, “We’re made so that we love,
First when we see those written, things that we passed,
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see…”
And Frost is nothing the same sense of sudden discovery when he says that success in “taking” figures of speech is as intoxicating as success in making them;” which certainly applies to whole poems as well as to the details of imagery.
Poetry indeed is not like life.
The poet discovers “new thresholds” new anatomies unsuspected in himself…
But the poet doesn’t accomplish only the knowledge of himself that adds a joy to such knowledge that creates a new mind.
And that isn’t accomplished by the direct means of logical analysis.
For poetry vitalizes the whole Man: “It is blood, imagination, and intellect running together”, and again, “It bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrink from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the body.”
The fountain jets from the body, and whatever magical, mystical qualities in here in poetry, they can never be separated from the senses.
Language is itself a sense medium and it creates a new physical body for the poet’s own consciousness; but in addition to that, the sense world and the inner world of thought and emotion are inseparable to the poet.
Each melts
Into the other
In his words.
Poetry awakens life
In the physical senses,
The emotions,
The mind,
And gives us
That shock of change
And intensity
That fertilizes
THE SOUL.
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Andry-Andreja Jakus, a Professor at Hacettepe University, Zagreb, Croatia, is Academic Writer, Bibliographer, Lexicographer, Translator, Language Tutor and Reviewer. In her columns, she writes on poetry, philosophy, cultural studies, history of religions etc.
Courtesy: Andry-Andreja Jakus/LinkedIn – Published with permission of the author
