Id guess Im not the only one whose ideas on what poetry or what art in general is change more often than my underwear?
At the moment my thinking is this ("my" being used in the loosest sense to mean what I've stolen from various essays and philosophers)
The aim of art is to be beautiful, and nothing else.
Then of course you have to define beauty, so you've pretty much taken one step forward and two back. But that at least eradicates anything with its main aim as a social purpose. There is nothing that annoys me more (well there is, but it annoys me alot) than going into a modern art gallery and seeing rows of "feminist" works and "marxist" works that are actually hideous. That sort of thing must be something, but I don't think it's art. Of course I had to say MAIN purpose cause things can be beautiful AND have a social purpose, otherwise Jane Austen and Dickens wouldn't have any beauty, and thats clearly not true.
So in Poetry, that would get rid of anything overtly trying to give a social message. Verse with a social message, like a painting with a social message, is a very nicely crafted useful piece and has it's due place in the round of human creation. But it isn't poetry.
But also, if something is beautiful, it would have to be beautiful to all people surely? This seems impossible really, people are so obviously different, so for this to work you have to be of the opinion that at the core of every human being is something essentially human, some kind of common experience. Conveniently, at the moment I am of this opinion.
Beauty then becomes something that corresponds with or discords with that inner common experience. PLEASE feel free to challenge me on this!
But, if we assume that as a definition of beauty, it really defines the boundaries for poetry. For one, you get rid of all the emotional teenage rantings that annoy people so much but which are so hard to kick out of the definition, so that should please most people (those that don't write it mostly!).
You may be now thinking "but isn't emotion part of that common experience, even the most important part?!?" But here is the clever bit and the most difficult when writing poetry - IF THE AIM OF POETRY IS TOWARDS THE COMMON EXPERIENCE, THEN THE SELF IS TO BE AT ALL COSTS AVOIDED! It's all very well to explore the depths of your own psyche using the craft side of poetry, but what you produce will not be art as it holds little or no interest for anyone else, and it will be nearly impossible for anyone else to see it as beautiful. Like the social purpose I suppose this would have to mean that the MAIN purpose of the poem would have to be selfless rather than it having nothing to do with the self, which is possibly also impossible.
If by some wacky wormhole in the space time continuum you have actually read all of that waffle, please, dear god please, let me know what you think, don't leave having suffered in vain!
waffle over.
