What I might want to say is not the point. it’s what the poem wants to say through me that matters. I’m not invoking any Romantic idea of inspiration. Sure, lines, images, words and ideas often appear unbidden but, unless you are a political, religious or social propagandist, you do not know at the start of the poem how it will end, what it is going to say or even what it is ‘about’. However, people who do not write poetry at a certain level often seem to think that the substance, the ‘meaning’ of a poem comes pre-packaged and only needs to be poured into a container,– sonnet, villanelle, free verse, whatever. If only it were that easy!
But poetry is a manifestation of language. At its most basic level, if the language isn’t right, doesn’t work in the context, the poem fails. Language is the basic medium and the best poetry in my opinion is that which is able to employ all the resources of language in the most concentrated, economical way.
What are these resources? Let’s start with ambivalence, suggestiveness, sound, cadence, tension and ‘drive’ To take a famous example, the first line of Auden’;s Musee de Beaux Arts: About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters How well they understood….etc Suppose we rewrite it as The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering
What have we lost? Everything. But primarily the cadence. What remains is a clear prose statement witout tension, whereas in Auden’s line structure the key concern of the poem is presented without an identified speaker. The second phrase intrigues us by its assertion ‘they were never wrong’, which is quite a claim, but we have to wait for the third element of the sentence to know who ‘they’ are. The sequence creates a mini tension, an element of surprise.