Thoughts on Poetry

You may or may not know this but I am part of a collaborative YouTube project called Writers on the Wall and I make a video every Tuesday, usually on a topic relating to writing or literature. This week's theme is poetry and I've been sitting at my computer for a while now thinking about what I'm going to say in this video. It's hard to decide because there's so much to be said on the subject of poetry. The thing is with poetry is that it is an art of many aspects and poetry can mean many different things, depending on the person and how they view it. This got me thinking; is there actually any dictionary definition of the word poetry? I searched in to Google the term "poetry definiton" and this is the first one I found:

Poetry is an imaginative awareness expressed through meaning, sound and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. 


For the purposes of this blog post I am going to ignore the fact that the above definition is rather wordy, fairly muddled and hardly a definition at all and focus on the last sentence. The very nature of poetry as an authentic mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. This sentence, for me, sums up my thoughts on poetry almost perfectly. it is not something you can out you finger on easily and it relies so much on personal taste that poetry has become something that only exists in the eyes of the beholder.

For me personally; I think poetry is it's most beautiful when accompanied by something else. I've never been a great fan of poetry books with individual poems that stand alone, that type of poetry has never really appealed to me; but poetry alongside music, art or as part of a novel has often taken my breathe away. Some people say that music says what words cannot and some say art does this too, but I disagree with this to an extent. I think that if you combine art or music with poetry you create something that speaks louder than anything else in the world. Of course I think a novel is capable of doing this too, especially when containing certain aspects of poetry but this is because novels are long and can contain so many words. Songs usually contain very few words but the music alongside these words allows the song to express just as much as an entire novel does. I find this amazing.

I don't know what I'm going to say in this video but maybe it's a bad idea to delve in to the true essence of poetry in the way I have just done in this blog post. It is slightly dry and probably boring. Instead, in my video, I will demonstrate the true essence of poetry.


Now I just need a poem to use...