Team 3a, Mapping Genre

Poets On Poetry: The Morality of Poetry

by Megan Carter

Abstract

In his in-depth analysis “Poets On Poetry: The Morality of Poetry”, Robert W. Blake contemplates the role of poetry in a predominantly scientific world, and discusses its persistent struggle to find a worthy place in educational spheres. Blake notes that poetry is solely utilized as a break from other sectors of curriculum and asserts that poetry lacks formal structure in curriculum in countless educational systems, and the need for this mentality about poetry to be vanquished, because ultimately, poetry provides the means for students and individuals to be an effective participant in and co-creator of their own culture.

Description

     Robert W. Blake outlines the morality of poetry within our society and considers its role within our smaller cultures and places of living in addition to our massive culture as an American people. Blake argues the central issue stems from a mentality that most Americans maintain without even knowing it: that poetry is not considered relevant or important enough to have a place in society, simply because it lacks a strong presence in classrooms starting as early as elementary school. Blake shapes a very essential element of the problem by addressing what psychologist Howard Gardner coined as the “logical-mathematical intelligence” (16), and which Blake goes on to further explain as an approach to thinking that has dominated our culture and education even for those well studied in literature. In this same way, Blake frames poetry and poems as, “...intricate, arcane, and accessible to only a few people with special training and aptitudes” (16), emphasizing the notion that individuals have become subject to, that all forms of the art can only be understood by a fraction of the population and thus, should not be bothered with at all except by those formally trained to understand it.

     In his next stage of analysis, Blake pins bodies of thinking and “ways of knowing” (16), as he calls it, against one another to show that there does not have to be only one end-all way of thinking and knowing, and that to be a potent scholar and human being, one must combine the scientific mode of knowing with the poetic way of knowing. He asserts that for a successful emergence of these styles of thinking, American citizens must work to completely alter and cultivate the mindset that has been ingrained in them from such tender ages, which is the idea that poetry is more than just a way of learning; it is also a way of knowing. Blake claims there are dangerous limitations to relying only on the scientific mode of learning and knowing, with the largest being that people who think in this regard, “...may take for granted—as unconsciously held assumptions—that there are absolutes in life” (16) and that, “... they may believe that reality can be approached only by logical, systematical steps and that good and evil are totally irrelevant to mathematics, logic, philosophy, and science” (16). This projects one to the core of Blake’s argument: that there is something to be said about the inherent morality of poetry and its ability to incorporate its ethicality into traditional science. As Blake postulates though, in the academic world, poetry has never been given a chance to do this, nor has it ever been framed as a valuable tool for knowing and understanding oneself and hence, the culture one lives in. As a society, there is far too much reliance on the “survival of the fittest” mind set, and much less on the perception that human existence should, in addition, be viewed from the individual’s perspective in a sacred manner. It is assumed that Blake’s argument can be made applicable to countries elsewhere and should be utilized in the same fashion as he proposes it to be used in American society.

     As a fundamental solution to this issue, Blake suggests a strategy focused on an “aesthetic, emotional recreational” (17) reading of the poem, as opposed to a “literal, factual reading of a poetic text” (17), which works to extract the true and received meaning of the poem as the student sees it, rather than the meaning that is produced from a systematical and logical analysis. Furthermore, Blake posits that poetry should be an emotional experience, as it serves to be a “witness and participant in one of man’s major transformations” (17). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Blake advances this argument by stating that “poetry is a way of reconstructing reality”, in which he provides a personal anecdote to exemplify the perception that by better understanding one’s reality, one has the opportunity to better understand the culture they are a part of and thus, be a better participant within the contexts of that culture. As an overarching and conclusive statement, not uncharacteristic of what Blake considers prior, he says, “In a truly amazing way, virtually all humans, though they may not be capable of abstract reasoning—such as higher mathematical thought—can learn through poetry. They can learn about themselves and about others and can learn enough about their culture to enter it” (18). Blake frames this as a task that can but does not have to be complicated, as it only requires only very basic level participation and emphasizes this practice as separate from natural intelligence, that there is something to be learned from poetry by everyone in every place, in every part of the world.

Commentary

     Though Blake specifically addresses the art of poetry, which is mathematically one half of our project, it works to frame it as an important organic scholarly practice to better understand additional knowledge gained in the classroom as well as the knowledge obtained outside of the classroom when one is immersed in the real world. Because the Mapping Genres group is working directly with poems from a poetry database, and because Blake’s argument supports their choice in doing so by stating that although there has been much debate about the use of poetry as an important tool for academic purposes, those arguments can be put to rest. This coincides with Mapping Genres in that it serves a bigger academic purpose; that they are not analyzing poetry just for the sake of analyzing an accepted form of literature, or simply because it resonates with them personally, but because it is a never-ending process worthy of pursuit, in the same way the act of writing is never truly “finished”. Poetry is something that should be acknowledged and consistently studied. The other half of their project, song lyrics, have traditionally and commonly been viewed as a form of poetry. They have noted that lyrics become a song only once musical elements are added to it, but that in its beginning stages, without question, it is a raw poem. In total, Blake’s argument serves to support the material [of lyrics and poetry] the members of Mapping Genres are working with, but does not in any depth confront the practice of analyzing the sentiment found in these forms of poetry, which is as much a part of the process of the project as the songs and poems chosen for investigation. Blake proposes close-reading strategies with special attention paid to emotion as a general way of analyzing poetry, but is limited in scope and lacks suggestions for more in-depth analytic tools. Ultimately, Blake’s argument lends itself to making sure poetry always has a presence in educational spaces, but does not contribute anything valuable to the sentiment analysis so crucial to Mapping Genres.

Resources For Further Study

• Devitt, Amy J. "Writing Genres" Rhetoric Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2005), pp. 342-345 Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/20176669

• Etzkorn, Peter K. "Social Context of Songwriting in the United States" Ethnomusicology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May, 1963), pp. 96-106 Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/924545

• Mayer, Rudolf, Neumayer, Robert, & Rauber, Andreas, Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of Music Information Retrieval, 2008. Print.  

• Weber, Robert Philip, "Basic Content Analysis", Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 82, No. 397 (Mar., 1987), pp. 354-355 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2289192