From the editor's desk

Poetry is one of the two literary forms of language, the other being prose. In poetry, the unit is a line making up stanzas while in prose, it is a sentence, fully grammatical, generally abiding by logic, with a linear narrative structure, building up the paragraphs. These generally lack an aesthetic appeal, while poetry has the potential of bringing out the beautiful and sublime without being painfully bound to logical or narrative thought processes. Unlike classical poetry, prose lacks a definite rhythmic pattern. Here is a first attempt at capturing what poetry has been accepted to mean. Next we shall have a glimpse of some poets’ ideas on poetry before taking strides towards another view of poetry by a great Poet-Seer.

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines ‘poem’ to be “a piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by particular attention to diction’, its origin being the French poème or Latin poema, from the Greek poēma. The Greek root for poetry is ‘poiesis’, which means ‘a making: a forming or creating of a poem’. Poetry is a literary art form, the creation manifested in the skillful and aesthically pleasing stringing of words such that it has an evocative quality. Certain devices are employed in poetry towards this end, such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm, rendering the poem a sound, musical feel, conveying a certain mood, setting the tone, while ambiguity, symbolism and irony, are devices that leave poetry to various interpretations according to how these are understood by the reader/reciter. Other common devices include metaphor and simile, which serve to introduce relationships previously unperceived.

Consider these views of poets on poetry

'I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering’ – Robert Frost

'Poetry fettered fetters the human race.' – William Blake
'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.' – Emily Dickinson

'Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.' – Don Marquis

'Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' – P B Shelley

'The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.' – T S Eliot

What are views of a Poet-Seer? Sri Aurobindo lays down high and exacting qualities of a poet and poetry. “Vision is the characteristic power of the poet….The poet really creates out of himself and not out of what he sees outwardly: that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work.” He describes art as that which “must attempt to make us see, and since it is the inner senses that it has to address itself...and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens to us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us.” Poetry, then, is spiritual, in its means and end, at its highest.

Sri Aurobindo adds a word of caution to all would-be Yogi-poets: “crave for the stimulus of an audience, social applause, satisfied vanity, appreciation, fame…must go absolutely...your art must be a service not of your own ego, nor of anyone or anything else, but solely of the Divine.”
Let us take a little dip in the pool of high poetry.