by S.E. Ingraham

Created on: May 11, 2010

“There is no money in poetry but then there is no poetry in money either,” Robert Graves, English poet 1895-1985. Depending on the day, most writers, the great ones in any case, could likely line up on either side of this debate. That is to say, one day they would consider prose the more difficult type of writing and the next, it would be poetry – it all depends – on where your head is, and where your heart lies.

Academic arguments aside, there is very little prose that stays forever in the mind and is quoted down through the ages. Not so with poetry – even those who profess they don’t particularly enjoy poetry can usually recite the odd passage or two – why is that? Because poetry is memorable – but it doesn’t get that way by accident. Writing poetry requires an enormous amount of patience and attention to detail, the ability to revise and rewrite, to recognize that what you have written is not what you meant to say and throw it away and start again.

Poetry does not allow the latitude that prose does – in prose, the writer has much more room to expand on a topic, expand and explain, expound even. The reader is more likely to stick with the writer of prose, to get where they are both going. Not so with poets – readers of poetry are very particular about the amount of words they will suffer through before they put the poem aside and move on. Poets have a very short span of attention grabbing time, and they know it.  Readers of poetry, at least until they have developed a rapport with a favourite poet, are a fickle lot, and will cast a new poet to the wolves without a second thought.

Prose comes about from many sources, many of them academic, some of them completely made from whole cloth – but the really fine writer of prose is the one who can lace his prose with liberal doses of poetic form, informing the merely prosaic with something more gripping, something lyrical that grips the reader in a way that normal prose does not. Often these writers are described as ‘great’ and with good reason. There is nothing finer than the combination that occurs when a poetic soul writes good prose. Witness writers like Faulkner, or Woolf, or even the more modern Steven King – admittedly a different type but certainly both poet and prose writer wrapped up in one.

It is often said that poets write from the heart. That is certainly true much of the time. Prose writers do the same some of the time. It is more difficult to pour forth from your heart day after day, to lay bare your soul, and yet poets do it routinely.

As Graves established in the 20th century, poets do not write poetry for the money – there isn’t money to be had for most poets – why then undertake this most difficult art form? As prosaic as it sounds, I believe poets write poetry because they must – and they do it for the love of words, the need to hear the sound of the words in their heads and their hearts. And it’s a very difficult labour of love all the same.

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