Poetry.......

I am extremely tired right now so I hope that this makes some kind of sense....

"The expression of the imagination"

This is a quote that jumped off the page at me when reading Shelley's A Defense of Poetry. I realize that there doesn't seem to be anything especially awe inspiring about those words, which describe poetry, yet they have come to finally mean something to me which makes them worth writing about. I have heard poetry described in similar ways several times, however, it wasn't until our class discussion last week that I began to see the truth about what it is saying. We discussed how the poet's role is to write about those things which we want to do in order to keep us from turning the desire into action. In other words, we imagine ourselves in different places around the world, meeting certain kinds of people, even performing acts of violence and revenge. The beauty of poetry is that it expresses what takes place in our imaginations---takes us to Italy to ride in a canoe through the streets, introduces us to the remote tribes in South America, and allows us to be taken through the emotions of poisoning our greatest enemy or murdering our brother, yet without having to actually perform the action ourselves.

I appreciate seeing how words are coming alive and forming new thought processes within my mind as a result of this class and the works which we are examining/discussing.