Images not Words

My final post is inspired by Addie's post. After reading her post I thought about the final post in the course and about what romanticism really means. We spent the entire semester talking about a time period and about poets labeled as "romantic." What does it mean? It is hard enough to define what poetry is, but how do we define this crucial time period in poetry. I think that John Clare's Pastoral Poesy" gives us one of the closest thoughts about poetry and romanticism.

In his lines, "True poesy is not in words, / But images that thoughts express" Clare captures an element of poetry that we discuss all of the time in class, but it is an aspect of class that we take for granted. Poetry and specifically romantic poetry does not just seem to be about the words. When I signed up for this course, I thought good poetry was about knowing the right words and being able to put those words together beautifully. However, after reading many of the poets this semester it becomes clear that poems are not just collections of words on a page, but rather they provide lines of poetry that suggest directions for your thoughts to travel. Clare's idea that poetry is about images is an important concept when thinking about poetry because it helps us decide why some poetry is successful and why other poems seem to fail in what they attempt to do. 

For example, Percy Shelley's Ode to the West Wind succeeds because the structure of the poem and the intentional decisions regarding language allow the reader to feel the wind in the poem. The West Wind serves both as the topic of the poem, but also functions as a character in the poem. It is not that the wind has a distinct voice in the lines of the poem, but it seems that the wind is responsible for the space between the lines and the order and configuration of the lines and words. Shelley gives the reader images and feelings about the wind that transcend the meaning of any individual word or line. However, I felt Felicia Hemans Casabianca failed to present vivid images, and instead (as professor Oerlemans said so well) the poem lost control of its images. We discussed in class the way that no lines jumped off the page, but that does not mean that she did not use big enough words, or that her lines did not read well. This poem lacked "tattoo lines" because word, line, or stanza inspired me to travel to the place of the poem. Hemans describes a dramatic boat fire. This moment is both intense and also filled with an abundance of interesting and rarely seen images. However, she does not take advantage of such a rich topic, and rather than allowing the reader to be on the fiery boat and feel the heat of the fire, the poem describes the scene in a way that the reader does not fully understand the picture that Hemans is trying to create.