by Abigail Phillips

Created on: September 07, 2008

First, to the issue of 'bad' poetry. I do not subscribe to the postmodernist view that there can be no such thing as good or bad in the arts. A work of art is only as good as the vision and skill of the person who produced it. Nor do I think it is especially difficult to know when a poem is bad, good or mediocre. However, while objective judgments can and should be made about a poem's quality this is not the same as judging its value.

Although a poem may not have much artistic merit some small part of it, maybe a line or description, a thought or feeling, may jump out from the rest of it and strike a chord with the reader simply because it is something they have thought, felt or experienced themselves. In this respect poetry is a form of communicating human experience from one person to another and even the weakest poetry might succeed in communicating some small part of itself to someone somewhere.

Poetry can also have political and historical importance. Perhaps it is recording a situation such as a war, genocide, revolution, or famine that has otherwise had little coverage. When learning Victorian history I was was given some poems to study that had been written by someone languishing in a poor house. While the poetry itself was not very well written it did give me a valuable insight into what life was like and I was able to quote some of it in an essay.

And do not forget the value for the person writing the poem. I write poetry and so do many of my friends. We do not write for a wide audience or to say something profound to the world but to clarify something, to write down something that has been troubling us, and to make us feel better -much in the way that someone might write a diary. It is with good reason that writing poetry is sometimes used to help people suffering loss or depression. It can be a cleansing experience and one that I would not begrudge others, even if they have no writing talent.

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