On Aesthetics and Fictional Poetry

I have mentioned before the difficulty in writing fictional sonnets. At that time I suggested that aesthetics might present an acceptable reason and model for deviating from reality. I will now expound on this subject at slightly greater length.

A sonnet - or any poem - can be understood on more levels than I wish to engage with at the moment. But for the present discussion it is important to pay attention to two of these ways: aesthetically and narratively. Both of these ways affect the ultimate goal of our understanding here, namely the emotional pull of the poem on the reader.

To understand a poem narratively is to enter into it through the path presented, unsurprisingly, by its narrative: what does the poem say, what does it say happened, how does it feel about what happened? The poem is interpreted through these questions, and the emotional impact of the poem relies on the interaction between the narrator, the narrative, and the reader. A sad tale will (hopefully) produce sadness in the reader, a happy one happiness, an eerie one a sense of eeriness; and the poem is sad, happy, or eerie depending on how the narrator presents the narrative to the reader. This is a useful, valuable, and important method of interpretation, and, in a broad sense, my own primary one. Under this method, a fictional poem can easily fall flat because the poet has difficulty negotiating the narrator/narrative interaction due to the distance set up between the poet and the narrator. This will not necessarily happen, and most of the other methods of writing fictional poetry mentioned earlier attempt to finesse this difficulty.

But an aesthetic understanding of the poem can avoid this difficulty entirely. Aesthetic interpretation enters the poem not through the narrative, but through the feel, sound, and appearance of the words. This does not mean that aesthetic poetry ignores the creation of a narrative any more than a narrative interpretation requires the abandonment of good aesthetics. But, aesthetically understood, poetry cares not about how the poet negotiates his relationship with the narrator or narrative, only about how the music, the taste, and the beauty of the words come across; effects that may even be made easier by the use of invention, as the possible ideal of accuracy is no longer present as a bar to aesthetic word choice.

I think it is clear from the foregoing that understanding poetry through aesthetics removes, or at least lowers, a potential barrier to the creation of fictional poetry. A poet may easily range beyond his or her own experience and emotions when the focus is on the beauty of the poem rather than the relatability of the narrative. Poetry understood as fine art in the sense of music or the visual arts rather than drama is substantially freer from the chains of reality - and such an understanding can lead to delightful, beautiful poetry.