Friday, 21 March 2025

TALKING ABOUT POETRY

 

TALKING ABOUT POETRY

Poetry is a song of life, its joys and sorrows, dreams and realities, hopes and desires, victories and defeats, successes and failures, smiles and tears, love and estrangement, loyalty and disloyalty, religion and philosophy, politics and statesmanship, loneliness and companionship.

It is as much a matter of the body as of the mind and the soul.

Normally, it is a metrical composition of feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas and imagination.

In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.  

According to William Shakespeare (1564-1616): The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.  

  French Jesuit missionary Father Andre (1623-1715) said: Poetry is the sister of sorrow; every man that suffers and weeps,is a poet; every tear is a verse; and every heart a poem.

American writer Gamallel (1807-59) believed: Poetry is itself a thing of God.  He made his prophets poets; and the more we feel of poesie do we become like God in love and power.

The purpose of poetry said Matthew Arnold (1882-1888) is to interpret life for us, to console us and to sustain us.

The expression of ordinary poetry should be simple; that of great poetry, sublime .

To conclude, this is what the Indian statesman and philosopher Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) said in a book on the Indian poet, writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941):  “The poet worships God as the spirit of beauty, while the philosopher pays his homage to God as the ideal of truth. Philosophy is the temple of truth, while poetry is the shrine of beauty.”

G.R.Kanwal                                      *********

World Poetry Day

 21 March 2025

 

      

 

 

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