Poetry Appreciation

What is Poetry and how does one appreciate poetry? The conventional definition of poetry is, “A literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of a distinctive style and rhythm”, but for now let us forget about this.

What does Poetry mean to all of us? Each and everyone of us have read poems in school. Some poems we enjoyed but some we simply found boring. Why? Any idea? The answer is simple, we enjoyed a few poems, because we understood them, but there were a few poems which made no sense to us simply because it was beyond our comprehension.

Generally, we all like poems which rhyme, because it is easy to remember and is fun to recite. Sometimes we come across poems which we find difficult to understand. The whole poem looks like a difficult puzzle which is almost impossible to solve. The first step towards appreciating poetry is to understand it, so when that fails, appreciating becomes very far-fetched.

Why do we understand stories better than poems? The answer is very simple. When a story is narrated every single detail is described and explained, but in a poem, there are no detailed explanations or descriptions, so the reader has to use his or her imagination to understand the poem. A story and a poem are like paintings. The only difference is that the story writer draws, colors, fills in all the details and presents it to us as a finished piece of art but in a poem, the poet only gives us the outline of the painting and gives us the freedom to fill it with colors.

Now let us try to figure out a way to understand a poem. A poem is like a picture puzzle. I am sure most of us have solved picture puzzles especially the ones where you have to join the dots (numbers starting from 1) to reveal the picture. Each line of the poem can be envisioned as a picture which is like a dot in the puzzle. Once all the dots or pictures are envisioned the reader can form the story. Try to do this the next time you read a poem.

Each poem can be understood and visualized differently by different readers according to each reader’s imagination. In fact, a poem can be understood and appreciated differently at different stages in the life of an individual. That’s the beauty of poetry. As the famous saying goes, “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”, is an apt saying when it comes to visualizing the beauty of poetry.