Black Voice News Online

Warning: array_multisort() [function.array-multisort]: Argument #1 is expected to be an array or a sort flag in /home/httpd/home/blackvoicenews/blackvoicenews.com/content/modules/mod_rt_slideshow.php on line 85

A Classification Of Poetry

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.

The word poetry ("the art of the poet") denotes any expression (artistic or otherwise) of imaginative feeling. It sometimes designates a precise literary art-- a subdivision of the Fine Arts. The Fine Arts are representations of nature. Poetic ideas consist of mental pictures of creatures or creations of nature-- or of distortions or fantasies of anything. Borrowing from a most brilliant classification of Ancient Africans' Universal Planes of Existence, here is my classification of Poetry: I--The Immaterial and unknowable Plane (i.e. Spiritual) has no boundaries; no beginning, middle, or end; no definition. II--The Sublime Plane (Intangible), made of pre-matter, is above time and space; has boundaries but beyond human perception; contains the world's highest concentration of love, goodness, truth, and beauty. III--The Tangible (made of matter) is subdivided into three parts. A. Unbounded Tangible. It contains the earliest matter, like a thought energy (limited only by time and space unless of a Sublime nature present in thought clouds). B. Partially Bounded Tangible. Its items have hazy boundaries -- heat, cold, electricity, radiation, sound, and emotions -- and can sort of be defined. Can be experienced but not seen or touched. C. Concrete Tangible (completely bounded) is specifically defined by size, weight, number, mass, volume, height, extent, and/or capacity. People agree on definitions because the objects can be seen, touched, and measured.

The mental images drawn from each of these planes represent the "seed" most poets cultivate in writing poetry. The "seed" images may be about a view of nature, about a past experience, or about an imagination. However, culturally established or newly created words used to describe mental images are of a Tangible plane nature and thus are inadequate for the Immaterial and Intangible planes. Since the Sublime is Intangible and therefore above and beyond the mind's ability to form a mental picture, poets pluck out of the vocabulary rainbow the most beautiful words. Then those are presented in new arrangements, new combinations, and new forms for the purpose of giving new meanings to the imagined mental picture in their heads. Example: "Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken" (G. Eliot). In other words, Poets choose symbols to represent images because they are invested with such significance as to stand for something special beyond itself-something that puts one in touch with or supports one's highest (or Real) self-something that helps make life more bearable or understandable. Such symbols convey both a "sense" unique to an individual (or group) and one or more "meanings" related to the "seed" mental picture.

Since Images are symbols and symbols constitute a language, we (poets and the audience) are able to rearrange, recombine, and make new forms that enable us to continually tell each other of our experiences of reality, of the comical, or of whatever. Part of the poet's skill is to choose the "perfect" word so as to have the "perfect" sound, positioning, meaning, and rhythm. No extra words are permissible. "Perfect" implies that the final effect touches the highest level of our spirit and elevates it above the Tangible world into the Sublime. Typically, poets select and describe a metaphor (equating unlike things) for purposes of presenting, elaborating on, and clarifying their basic idea-an idea that does not lend itself to otherwise being understood or even described as it stands. Personification (making a lifeless or abstract thing alive) is an example.

website: www.jablifeskills.com

Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.