by Austin Janeway

Created on: October 31, 2009

One will think that poetry is a mere culmination of human experience. That it is a mere reflection of the subject or article of experience at which it is aiming to depict. How wrong one can be. Quite superficial is he who assumes that poetry is a mere recount or retelling of the poets life. No; poetry is a more delicate reflection of the poets opinions and inner contemplations, rather than a stale documentation of corporeal experience - no matter how insightful such experience is.

Poetry transcends the aforementioned barriers that technical writing poses in order to bring forth a more lucid and infinite determination of the opinion of the poet. Rather than relying on base experiences a poet, much like an avid painter, can draw from his palette of opinions a suitable expression of words in which to convey them. For instance, a poet may describe the age-scarred bark of a weathered tree that stands solemnly in an orchard. This tree could be one that exists solely in the cavernous confines of the poets endless mind; in reality the tree is a symbol of loneliness in old age. What this shows is that the poet might never have seen such a tree, and indeed if he had, that the physical manifestation of such a tree was not endowed with such fantastical qualities as it had in his work.

Yes, it is only through the lens of experience that we might be able to conjure together the formation of words that expresses what we feel. Even if we were to adopt the corporeal approach and believe that our poetry is written based on primal experience we would come to a blinding existential realisation. Even our experience is tainted with our ever prevalent opinion. The only way we have of viewing the world - our opinionated and realistic perceptive faculties - is ever being influenced by the bane of our innate opinons. The trash of one man is indeed the treasure to another.

Indeed, all poets are perhaps proverbial Basil Hallward slashing paint onto a fatal canvas; a mere expression of our opinion for the beauty of one thing. Everything that we experience is indeed corrupted by the Midas Touch of our opinions, and it is perhaps most appropriate to end the debate with such a conclusion. Yes, even as we try and flee from the opinions that we hold in order to write a truly Bohemian work, we will always be weighted with the baggage of our inner contemplations and clockworks.

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