by Lakshmi Swami

Created on: October 09, 2009

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.

'

Learn more about this author, Lakshmi Swami.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.