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| No | 32% | 399 votes | Total: 1238 votes | |
| Yes | 68% | 839 votes |
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Can bad poetry have value?
Taste for poetry is declining. As civilization advances, love for poetry declines. Poetry in the modern context is trash. Poets like romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, the eighteenth century poets like Pope, the Victorian poets like Tennyson and Browning and the early twentieth century poets like D.H.Lawrence and Thomas Hardy introduced values in their poems. A clear message was conveyed.
Today poetry has lost its virtues. Reading public is busy and even if the people love poetry, they don't have time to decipher what exactly the poet meant by some of the imageries. There is no time to analyze poetry. Poetry today is prose running crazy.
During the seventeenth century, poetry was fancy, the poets living in an atmosphere of fantasy like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They composed their poems from inspiration by keen observation of nature or man's baviour in general in relation to times.
Poetry today runs like this:
The dog bothers me and his allergy makes me sick.
The above sentence is hardly poetic but such sentences go as poetry. Why take the trouble of calling it poetry; call it prose. Some of the poems which have no poetic flavour are poems s for reckoning. There are several factors that contributed to this conclusion. Many of the songs and poems that are now in vogue are easy to read and no strain is involved. Intellect is not involved.
William Blake, the pre-romantic poet wrote a very simple poem TIGER He begins the poem with a bang:
Tiger tiger burning bright
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could make thy fearful symmetry?
The poem is so simple but majestic as the tiger. The lines 'what immortal hand or eye' is to be properly understood. They give a lot of food to the brain to think. The imagery is great 'immortal hand or eye'. The poet is unable to conceive the physical strength and the skill of the creator of the tiger- this is bought into this poem.
Blake wrote this poem five hundred years ago and is still remembered. He was a great poet. There was a mystic element in his poems. Today poetry may be all right for those who read poetry for fun. Poetry is criticism of life Matthew Arnold said. Wordsworth defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillityW.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot are very modern but their poetry is class by itself.
What is bad poetry? The poetry that people forget, I think is bad poetry. The very fact that people love to memorize and enjoy repeating the lines is definitely poetry with a difference. Shakespeare's sonnets, Keats odes Shelley's intellectual fervour are some of those with tremendous value.
I will not be able to do justice unless I bring out some of the lines I still remember. If poems have no value they will be forgotten and good poems are always remembered. It will be impolite for me to quote some of the bad poems lest it should offend people. But they may argue what is bad poetry and what is good poetry! I tried to explain.
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Learn more about this author, Lakshmi Swami.
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Yes
There is value in all poetry, even those works we do not like or understand. Some works I have studied are classics but are determined to be hard to interpret. Indeed, there are some poems that are so nonsensical that we are not enlightened by them, but simply perplexed. However, to someone, somewhere, this poetry may have value. If a selection impacts just one person in a positive way or has meaning on some level, it has value. Most certainly, it has had value to the author.
The literature book I was using had 2,235 pages packed with the works of famous authors. Not all of the selections are what I would have chosen to read if they had not been assigned, but at the same time I think, "Who am I to critique the works of these famous authors whose words have made it through history to the pages of our literature books?" Many of my classmates had the same questions and frustrations as we read Cummings, Yeats, Dickinson, and a host of other great authors. Everyone seemed to prefer the simple poems that we could grasp immediately, without having to dig too deeply to uncover the many layers of meaning. Some of the poems were difficult because we had to read them many times to get any meaning at all-the author's or our own. Still, there was a degree of value because they made us think. In order to find meaning, we had to delve into the poem from many angles. It was as much a class in critical thinking as it was literature.
For the purpose of exposure to literature of all genres, everything we read had value. It may not have been possible to get inside the mind of the writer as well as we may have wanted to, to put together the puzzle of the arrangement of the words. But the words had value to the author, and because humankind is not as fragmented a species in some respects as we may think, the words ultimately had value to the reader. Whether we understood the author's intent or not, we could use our own interpretation of the work and extract our own understanding from it.
Contemporary writing is sometimes less discernible than the classics. Those poems that include slang and street language or other types of unconventional English are not what some of us would choose to read. We may not fully comprehend the meaning, nor may we appreciate the author's style, and we may not want to read a piece a second time, but that does not make it bad. We must remember that it may be valuable to some other reader who may be better able to grasp the intent and be able to more easily apply it to his or her own life.
Learn more about this author, G. Allendorfer Anderson, PhD.
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