Jack7
First Post
I think that is a very good analysis too.
I also think that with good poetry, aside from the allusions, symbolism, etc. in linguistic form (which is what I meant in the fact that it stimulates a different way of thinking, like learning a foreign language, new vocabulary and grammatical construction patterns that see different "orders of perception and expression," or like geometry, a different way of "measuring and encompassing reality"), also promotes and stimulates "the imagination." By this I mean the imagination outside of itself, or outside the entirely subjective scope of the individual.
And yes I think it may be a difficult form to learn, of course anything can be learned with practice, as you said because so much of modern society is geared towards the immediate gratification of the imagination. That is to say with much modern "media" (not oral story-telling, or memorized mytho-poetic tales of the fantastic) the imagination is not so much stimulated with internal visions of a subject matter greater than the individual, but the imagination is guided - the imagination does not have to work so much as consume - from the objective to the subjective without much work on the part of the consumer so moved. Although much of modern poetry has lost the ability, in the "senseless orgy" to talk about small, mundane things, like coffee grinds and bubblegum stuck to your shoe (it has become all about subjective experience and has no greater purpose, meaning, or experience beyond the immediately obvious), that it both bores most people silly and "senseless" and yet also goes nowhere worth recounting. (Plus it tends to be not very impressive technically, in form or structure.) It has become the TV-era of the form (poetry). It has no end (pun intended), just recounts whatever it happens to encounter in a sort of stream of consciousness voyeurism.
(However to be fair as modern media becomes more and more complex it is finding new methods, and sometimes rediscovering old methods - like viral influences, and if you ask me poetry is a viral influence, it implants things other than the obvious upon the field of perception and imagination- and I'm glad to see that. In other words many forms of modern media are moving out of their infancy and into more complex realms of expressions, similar I suspect as to when any form of effort moves form the early stages of it's existence and becomes more complex and capable.)
The reason I say all of this about poetry is because, aside from the act that it is a subject that interests me on many levels (linguistic, psychological, perceptual, mental, spiritual, artistic, even scientific), I think that poetry and fantasy have been for most of human history, and should continue to be, analogues of one another. That is they both indirectly and yet substantially stimulate both the psyche and the imagination in ways that few other forms can. And I think that is why for most of human history, aside from the pragmatic mnemonic benefits you mentioned, poetry and fantasy have been far more often than not, closely interwoven, or to be more honest, the one has been en-clothed within the other.
Most great fantasy of the past has been poetic in nature, or constructed in such a way that the prose is proetic, or the prose often overlaps or transforms itself into poetic sections. Because fantasy has in many ways served the same functions as poetry, though both serve different functions as well. And speaking of well I could, well, go on this way for some time in this vein about this kind of thing. But this morning I'm taking my kids and my Saint Bernard to the lake. So I'm gonna kill this. But I have enjoyed the exchange.
Anywho last night before bed I read, or re-read, an old story by Lord Dunsany called The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (which I highly recommend). I was drinking some wine and reading that story and suddenly it struck me how much the story reminded me of Jack Flanders, especially The Fourth Tower of Inverness, and then I thought of radio, and how radio once had the power to stimulate the imagination, and allude to, and "symbolize in the air," in much the same way as poetry and fantasy. And I thought back to what you had said about TV. And it made me laugh. Because television literally means "to see from afar," like a Palantir, and I think of it as God Technology, though I reckon it is as often used to see as much slop as the sublime.
In any case I sorely wish that there was more modern fantasy along the lines of Lord Dunsany (a brilliant imagination) and more fantasy along the lines of Jack Flanders. It would be a much better genre if there were more of that kinda thing.
Well, I gotta go.
Lat'r gators.
