For those who are too lazy to click the link. 
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Poetry is
Experience: The Writer's
Responsibility
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Why does a reader come to a poem in the first place? Is it because
she wants to know about the poet? Is it because she wants to know
what the poet feels about something? Is it because she wants the
poet to lecture her about something? Absolutely not.
A reader comes to a poem for one reason: she wants to experience
something herself, to feel something herself. She doesn't care what
the writer has experienced or felt; she wants those things for
herself. That's why successful poetry is reader-centered, not
writer-centered.
And how do we experience things? Fundamentally, through the senses.
We see the shape of dogwood blossoms, we hear the sound of rain on
leaves, we smell fresh cow dung. Our experiences are rooted in
specific, concrete, immediate sense perceptions.
And that is precisely the function to poetry: to create experiences
for the reader. The only way it can do so is through focused,
detailed sensory perceptions--images. It's not an accident that the
word "image" is the root of "imagination"; poetry is that use of
language which allows the reader to have an experience in her
imagination.
For that reason, abstraction frequently is the enemy of successful
poetry because abstractions are not things we ever directly
experience. Abstractions are generalizations drawn from experience
and, as such, are at least one remove away from direct experience.
We never actually experience "beauty"; we see a rose, a seashell, a
face, which we identify as "beautiful," but that identification is
a process of generalization based on similarities both of sense
perception and of emotive response to those sense perceptions. Only
the immediate, the concrete, the tangible produce both the sense
perception and the accompanying emotive response; the generalized
and abstracted conceptualizations themselves lack the capacity to
do so.
Poetry often deals with generalizations and abstractions;
successful poems, however, are those which do so in concrete,
specific terms which allow the reader to experience something. It's
of little use to the reader to be told the writer has experienced
'enlightenment' for instance. So what? The reader doesn't care
about the writer; she wants to experience it herself. That's why a
poem would have to present the experience of "enlightenment' in
direct sensory terms, not generalized abstractions.
Certainly, very good writers use generalizations and abstractions,
but they almost inevitably do so in concrete, imagistic terms.
Pope's Essay on Man deals with the abstract conceptions of a
particular form of universal order, but the poem is a great one in
part because Pope is able to express the abstract conceptions by
means of a wealth of specific, perceptible images. For example,
when Pope says
"Hope springs eternal in the human b.reast:
Man never is, but always to be blest"
he follows with a concrete illustration:
"Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the colud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
The abstract conception is realized (in the sense of made tangible
and perceptible) in specific, concrete terms.
Shakespeare does the same thing with the abstract conception of
"love" in "Sonnet 116," where love, among other things, becomes
concretized as the North Star, always visible and providing a
reliable guide: "It is the star to ev'ry wand'ring bark."
Similarly, Keats, in recognizing that he is unlikely to live long
enough to achieve those things he wishes and that they therefore
have no value to him, describes this recognition not in abstract
terms but in a concrete image:
"--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink."
Keats portrays himself standing on a desolate beach staring out
into the vast ocean where "Love and Fame"--implicitly described as
ships--sink and are lost forever. These concrete images communicate
far more than any quantity of pure abstractions ever could.
Beginning writers almost
universally lack the skill to deal adequately with abstractions and
are therefore told to avoid them until they have acquired
considerable experience. Focus instead on communicating with the
reader through focused, concrete images because these are what
allows the reader to have the imaginative experience that is what
poetry is all about.
In other words, ask not what the reader can do for you, but what
you can do for the reader.
