On Emotion in Poetry

So one obvious question that arises when I declare that I am interested in the process of crystallizing experience into poems is whether the poems that I write honestly reflect the emotions I experience; a related question is whether they are topical, that is to say tied to a single emotional moment. I have dealt with the former question to some degree previously. I will now endeavor to discuss the latter - with a touch of the former - in a bit more depth.

I certainly used to write completely topical poetry. I began writing sonnets because I was writing them to my then-girlfriend. They were about her. They were unabashedly about her (well, after my initial abashedness at writing them in general had faded, at any rate). They were clearly topical.

Since then, I will not claim to have completely abandoned topical poetry. It has its place; usually the poems I write in this way are exhortations of some kind, to help my friends or myself get through something. Sometimes they are observational, like about the weather or otherwise about nature. It is much more, I might say vanishingly, rare that they are about my personal emotions.

The reason for this is that I have come to what I think is a better place as regards writing the poetry of emotion. I used to, and to a certain extent I still do, believe that William Wordsworth's famous claim in the preface to Lyric Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" was false, or at least strongly overblown. However, I have come much closer than I ever would have expected to this position. I believe that poetry is best as a synthesis between remembered, felt, and imagined emotion.

Specifically, that means that poetry draws on emotions that were felt in the past, and the recollection of not only how they felt then but how they developed (in retrospect) over time; on emotions being felt in the moment of creation and how they feel then, and how they are recognized to have grown in the immediate past; and on emotional intuition regarding how others feel, how the writer may or will feel in the future, and how one might feel about something that is counterfactual. All three of these streams and their subdivisions can and should be sluiced together. A poem that relies too strongly on any one of the three, or particularly any one subset of any of the three, risks weakness and especially risks feeling shallow, insubstantial, or restricted.

The goal of this combination is to produce a poem that speaks as generally as possible while retaining a link back to the initial generative thought - whether that thought was imaginative, immediate, or memorial. If one begins by recalling emotion, one should also search one's current state for links to that emotion, and begin to contemplate imaginatively what that emotion might do or mean; if one begins in the moment, one should recall past experience and also move through the imagination towards a broader understanding of the moment; and if one begins with the imagination, one should always attempt to ground the feeling in something remembered or currently felt. The combination of these processes will lead to a general poem on a specific event, whether, as above, that event is an actual occurrence (recalled or immediately lived) or an imaginative act. The important point is that the poem both connect to the triggering thought and to the wider world or wider range of experience in the world.

So it is for this reason that, although there is a reason for writing every poem, I would no longer say that my poems, especially my poems about emotion, are truly topical or occasional. They are related to some triggering event, yes, but they partake much more generally in my experience and my imagination. They are general poems, even as they have a topic.