Emotions and Poetry: How not to vomit on the page.
Myth: the essence of a poem is expressing emotion.
The Word Vomit Technique. Illustration by Chris Giles of My Beautiful Paintings.
Before I get all grr on “emotional poetry,” I want to say this: I’m all about poeming in the diary, discussing heartbreak and daily doings, but that doesn’t make a poem great. And great poems can express big feelings. In fact, any good piece of writing should evoke emotion in the reader. It’s what connects the reader to the work. But just as in novels and essays and all that prosey stuff, a good poem has a story first.
A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story uses sensory detail, characterization, setting, and narrative to work its magic on the reader. And why should a poem be any different? A story is all the good stuff that brings us around to the feelings. It has to come first. It’s like Step 1. And much like Ikea furniture, it’s a good idea in poetry to perform step 1 before trying to install step 2.
So my theory is this: A good poem isn’t about emotions, it makes the reader emote. It evokes emotion in the reader by using emotive imagery. And to achieve this, you’ve gotta start at ground level or else your whole poem is going to fall apart just like a poorly furnished college apartment.
Now, emotional poetry is definitely a thing and a lot of writers love it and it’s where a lot of us start as poets. There’s a reason I recommend Sylvia Plath to many beginning poets trudging their way through the perils of high school. I think she is the original emo kid — she’s got her heart on her sleeve and she’s not afraid to use it. But the thing that Sylvia has that a lot of journal poetry doesn’t is the sense of story that I already mentioned, the imagery and sensory detail. Plus, you know, that haunting voice. Here’s an example:
“April 18″
the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull
and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation
I would not remember you
or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these
and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops
a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight
–Sylvia Plath
SO. Love or hate Sylvia Plath, we can all agree on a two things:
1. She tells a story with her poem. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
2. She makes us feel things.
Sylvia Plath leads an emo band. Illustration by Chris Giles of My Beautiful Paintings.
Imagine if the poem were simply a list of feelings, though. Would that be interesting? I don’t think so. Anyone can list feelings and use a thesaurus to come up with a few extra S.A.T. words for “grumpy” and “tears” and throw in some linebreaks and call it a poem. What I want from a poem when I’m reading is a reason to feel for the narrator, a sense of what the narrator feels and why. And, duh, I want that story.
So, Sylvia Plath nails it with that #2. She makes us feel things. And she uses all those tricks that I believe make a poem work. I mean, wow, that first couplet? It’s dark. It’s creepy. And it’s so, so sad. Even better, in this and in so much of Plath’s poetry, there is space for the reader to go in, suck in the words, swirl them around in his mouth, and taste what he needs to taste. He may or may not like the poem, but he hasn’t just had to consume word vomit. Which, really, is what happens if you just let your feelings dance around unhinged while writing.
I’m sorry, folks. But your word vomit — or soul vomit, as I’ve come to think of some of the more, er, emotional poetry that, yes, even I wrote back in the day — belongs in a first draft or in a journal.
And really, I have to wonder, where does this myth that poetry = emotion come from? Is it our schools, where overworked and underpaid teachers are given a single week in which to teach poetry by the Powers That Be? Is it the fact that contemporary works are physically inaccessible to young people and are, indeed, less read than, say, Shakespeare’s soppy (if lovely) sonnets? Regardless, I’d say that emotions in poetry is a good thing, and I’d encourage any poet endeavoring to make his readers feel something to use his words to do just that. Make the reader feel it.
Such a wonderful *how not to* Emily! Really relate to it
And concur totally on Plath x
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed.
Hey Emily,
Here’s one of the more famous definitions of poetry, that also says some of what you’re getting at here. The idea that poetry=emotion comes from people paying attention to the first part of what Wordsworth has to say, and ignoring the rest of it.
‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.’
—William Wordsworth, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800
So, when people say poetry=emotion, they’re missing his point: you have the emotional experience, but it only becomes poetry when you can recollect that experience peacefully, at some emotional distance. And then the job of the poem is to reproduce that emotion, or its likeness, in the reader.
I suspect the modernists would say something quite different about poetry, but this works for anything in the Romantic tradition, for me at least!
Cheers.
Absolutely, Simon. And I’m not sure what modernists would say, but I know that emotion and poetry are so closely tied that it’s easy for beginning and even experienced poets to forget the story part of poetry, the language part, and remember only the emotion. I think if we could get all young writers to consider this Wordsworth quote and Barthes’ Death of the Author we’d be in good shape.
It’s a fine theory and I wonder if it even holds up, even if we look at the other romantics – even if we are very conservative about it and omit the ‘neoclassical’ romantics (Byron) or the ‘late’ romantics (Tennyson) or the Scots (Burns, Hogg) or the just plain weird (Blake). Just apply the theory to the famous works of Coleridge – Kublai Kahn, or The Ancient Mariner. I just can’t see that Kublai Kahn is a distillation of a powerful emotion recalled in tranquility – it’s the record of an experience, maybe; I just like it because it’s a very musical poem about some very strange fantastic ideas. The Ancient Mariner is more problematic, but if it’s really about a ‘powerful emotion’ that Coleridge has recollected in tranquility, then it’s odd that he’s universalised those emotions (in the central narrative figure, the Mariner). I don’t think there’s any one theory that can encompass that great poem actually – you could read it as a theological improvisation, a disguised autobiography, an early science fiction, a tale of hardships at sea, or something else. But I can’t see how the straightforward theory of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ is good enough.
Perhaps we can tentatively apply it to a few other poets – Keats, yes, possibly. Shelley, mmm, maybe, although like Coleridge he seems to resist easy interpretations (I mean, he claimed that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I just can’t see how that’s about ‘emotions recollected in tranquility’!)
Hey! Ain’t nothing soppy ’bout Shakespeare’s sonnets ma’am! Yee ha! Ahm Cletus! Shakespeare’s sonnets ah powerful drahmatic enactments of ideahalised emotions of tragedy and courtly love ma’am! Ahm Cletus! Yee ha!
Ahem. Don’t know where that came from.
Also, here’s what Wendy Cope had to say about that Wordsworth quote.