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by Mohsine Bensaid

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Once I composed my very first verses, which were about love, I was brimming over with happiness and pride, for I felt that I truly belong to those lines and they too belong to me, creating one heart and mind, expressing the same feeling and thought, yet simultaneously I felt how cruel was Plato to bar poets from entry to his Ideal Republic.

Poetry is of use to his State if it renders spectators manly rather than effeminate and, most significantly, if it preaches conformity, discipline, restraint and order. In my perspective, if lack of discipline and restraint can actually assist in changing men's state and life, as a collectivity, from misery towards stability, and why not towards prosperity, it is then a must to act against the current of dull conformity, delusive order, and I must add, miserable obedience.

Predicaments can sometimes yield the best in people; similarly, through disorder poetry strives to bring about the true genuine order that advocates virtues and denounces vices, aiming at keeping Man's heart and mind in equilibrium all the time. By and large, through writing, one can make one's voiceless voice voiced. Writing is the chant of the dumb, the might of the frail. As the old saying goes, the pen is mightier than the sword.'

Poetry, and not any other genre, is flexible in the sense that it can readjust to the variability of time and audience and can accept a myriad of readings; hence, in poetry, truth is a set of enigmas, wrapped in the poem, imbuing the reader with indescribable inquisitiveness and untold desire to unravel those mysteries. The latter are unsolved until the reader can feel and hear the poet's heartbeats, of love and joy or of pain and agony, inside the poem's chest.

"All good poetry", William Wordsworth said, "is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." I say poetry is that overflow of powerful feelings and of powerful thought. In his definition of poetry, Wordsworth intentionally, and notoriously, disregarded the poet's faculty of thought and sense of reason. For Wordsworth, as for all Romantic poets, all good poetry should spring from the inner world of the poet so that it mirrors their innermost feelings. Hence the Romantics' emphasis on the world of imagination and emotion. Actually, Wordsworth deemed the individual poet as the sole source of good poetry- opposing neoclassicism that considered poetry as a representation of human life.

The Romantics firmly believed in individual emotion rather than common experience and strongly stressed the superiority of imagination to reason. Though it is far from my object to investigate the why the Romantics perceived the source of poetry as the imaginative inner world of the individual poet, I should think that it is because they were either unable to interact with the world of matter or they were incapable of accepting the unpleasant reality. This would account for the reason why they wrote in isolation, or even, why some of them were seen as maniacs by the community where they lived, as the case of William Blake.

With regard to the source of poetry, the Romantic view on poetry appears to be, up to a certain point, in accord with the words "poetry for poetry's sake." Presumably the distinction between the two mainly lies in the end of poetry or, as it were, its target.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the Romantic who demonstrated the greatest interest in the possibilities of change through widespread social revolt. His poetry encouraged revolutionary political ideas. His remarkable poem England in 1819 opens,

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king;'.

In fact, if the reader's experience of this poem depends merely on its intrinsic elements, ignoring the poem's extrinsic implications, especially the historical context in this example, then this experience must certainly be unsuccessful by virtue of the risk of reading into the poem what is not truly there, and hence it would be even fallacious.

A.C. Bradly, in his essay Poetry for poetry's sake', suggests that the formula Poetry for poetry's sake' tells us that this imaginative experience- the poem- is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, and has an intrinsic value. What I strongly oppose in this formula is the poem's separation from the poet, that I perceive as the cutting of the umbilical cord which connects a fetus to its mother. Yet, the baby does exist outside its mother's womb, whereas the poem cannot have a life of its own, detached from the poet's heart and mind that have been moved by a certain state of affairs or impinged upon by a certain environment before splitting the pen's ink poetically.

As the Romantics attempted to escape the bitterness of the actual, the proponents of "Art for Art" try to ignore the maker of this art. In this context, the maker stands for both the source and the target inasmuch as both indirectly collaborate to give us the artifact.

Whereas E. A. Poe stressed the notion of the "poem per se...written solely for the poem's sake," denying to the source any separate poetical existence, the Romantics viewed the poet, a person of wonderful feeling, emotion, and sensibility, as the only source. But the source can never be that nothingness of Poetry for poetry's sake' adherents, and is not solely the poet, referring to the Romantic expressive theory that views poetry basically in terms of the poet*. The source is, indeed, both poet and context.

Furthermore, the target is not the nonbeing, regarding the creation of the reader's total aesthetic experience as the sole aim of poetry; conversely, the target is the reader, not the one seeking art for art, but that member of the community, the citizen, the human being. All literary art exists so as to communicate something; therefore, this thing being communicated should highlight the value of a work that actually resides in the usefulness of art for ulterior purposes and at the same time taking into account the intrinsically artistic beauty of a work that reflects the harmonious inseparability of the artist and his work which can be portrayed as the impossibility of the baby's existence without the pre-existence of its mother.

Aristotle believed that the universe had never had a start and would never ever get to an end. For him, change was cyclical. Presumably, poetry can be perceived as Aristotle's view on existence. That is, one's context, with its stresses, drives, pressures and motives, inspires one to produce a work of art.

Thus, the production of poetry is also cyclical; it is so when the source is partly the target and the target is partly the source, with some inescapable overlapping. However, this is not to be thought of as adherence to a determinist/ naturalist perspective or an application of a receiver-centred approach to poetry.

Every single thing in this universe has been created to communicate some certain thing that, in turn, carries with it meaning, and therefore makes sense to others, but this understanding is not always acceptance. To put it another way, in the realm of poetry, the reader might appreciate every single letter, or even might fall in love with every single line the poet has composed, but simultaneously might not accept and agree with them.

This is perhaps akin to Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, where the speaker does believe everything his mendacious sweetheart says although he is heartily- in both meanings of this word- sure and certain that she lies. In our case the reader is the sonnet's speaker, but the poet is not a liar.

Actually, theorizing about the ingredients of the poetical source and target cannot be, of course, condensed into some few leaves, but requires a wider view.

Learn more about this author, Mohsine Bensaid.

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