As we saw thanks to Cheese's suggestion, songs are similar to a form of poetry, and the lyrics are often poetry, so we probably all listen to and perhaps speak poetry more often than we think.
A quick question: why have humans created and recited poetry for thousands of years?
The earliest works of literature in Greek and Latin are poems. And in English, the written language really begins with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - a long poem telling a series of stories. Why do you think this is so? What made poetry the language that endures?
I think that poetry is the language that cultures remember because it ... actually, I don't want to say what I think till I've seen what you say (to revise Forster a little).
ReplyDelete"Love is not love
DeleteWhich alters when it alteration finds,"
Most of my friends would probably say that they don't read poetry, but it's so common in our culture that when they hear the above words in movie or TV series, they immediately recognize them from Shakespeare's sonnet. They might not know that it's sonnet 116, but the words and their meaning will be familiar to them: even if we don't read it, we are surrounded by poetry — from pop songs to nursery rhymes.
"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again."
That's probably the first poem I learned, almost sixty years ago.
Since poetry can be impressive and easy to remember to people so we write that.
ReplyDeleteI think "easy to remember" is right. What makes it easy to remember?
DeleteIt is simple and beautiful. It is also easy to remember.
ReplyDeleteI agree with "beautiful," but I'm not sure about "simple." We read, for example, in Amanda Gorman's poem for Joe Biden's inauguration a few days ago:
Delete"We've braved the belly of the beast
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace"
I think it's beautiful, but I'm not sure how simple it is, although by the standards of poetry, at least the grammar is fairly straightforward.
It is certainly memorable: my brain is not so good these days as it used to be when I remembered a lot of my favourite poetry. These days, I often need to look at the text to be reminded of how well Keats, Donne, Slessor or some other poet has expressed an idea.
Both the text and the author reading her poem are available on the CNN website at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/20/politics/amanda-gorman-inaugural-poem-transcript/index.html
DeleteBecause humans created it because thousands of years we don't have science theories about how things happened, what is the earth and solar system from etc. Thus people just wrote it from their imaginaries, then influent others to believe it or read it as their leisure time. And their complex or soapy or fantasy made people recognise and made it endures.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of why we read a selection from Homer's 2,800 year old poem bThe Iliad. We were looking at changing perceptions about the form of the world, and the story of Achilles' new shield and armour in book XVIII presents a view that presents the world as a flat disc, an idea that was on the way out by 500 BC, when the ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was a sphere (Pythagoras of geometric fame knew this), although Aristotle was still sure a couple of centuries later that the sun went around the Earth.
DeleteAlso, Homer is one of my favourite poets.