I have recently spent time selecting poems for slots on a local radio station's equivalent of "Poetry Please".
Along with nineteen others I have been asked to read several of my poems and to then "discuss them" for a run of six weekly shows, so I am feeling rather chuffed with myself.
Having trawled through my stock I have come up with a varied bunch for the show, one of which will be PROPHECY.
Written at the start of a relationship as a predictive "warning", it proved me to be clairvoyant.
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| You need big balls to make prophecies |
As a poet, which of these statements rings the truest to you?
ReplyDelete1. "Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted." (Percy Shelley)
2. "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." (T.S. Eliot)
3. "Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off." (Philip Larkin)
Flattered though I am by the term "poet", I am grounded enough to realise that I am not (really).
ReplyDeleteI suspect the use of a quotations web-site for your question, quite probably http://www.whimsy.org.uk/poetry.html which contains these quotes, in this order, yet I am curious about your questioning and its likely course; so let’s "play the game" and let's call it The Psychology PHD Questioning Game.
My choice is T.S.Eliot; even though you have opted to shorten it from its original form of, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.":-
Some emotions have to be turned loose (to the page) to unburden ones mind and quite possibly escape the emotional frustrations of actually have to express a poem’s content directly to its intended recipient(s). I can also accept that a poem can be an escape from personality, quite possibly because the external personality could not publicly express the inner personality that actually writes a poem.
The second part of Eliot’s quote reveals his understanding of the need for all of us to occasionally escape from our public personality and inner emotions, by abandoning or exorcising them onto a page. A simile of this insight could be using the service of a priest during confessional.
I don’t want to publicly go digging around in my personality, as I see no reason to disassemble what others will do anyway.
Which would be your choice and why?
Actually, I got my quotes from a different site - and the Eliot quote was unfortunately truncated. I say unfortunately, because the second sentence casts the first in a wholly different light. Bah! Stupid Internet!
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, my own choice would be Larkin - and I suspect (if your penultimate sentence is true) that you feel a bit like that too.