Poetry
“Since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things” (Cumming, in Bump 155). My thoughts exactly. Many times I find myself unable to understand a poem because the metaphor is something I am unfamiliar with or the literary devices are just way over my head. I get frustrated and sometimes think that the poet must have been high at the time, because no rational human being would get this. I am forced, therefore, to take away from the poem how I feel, my first impression and the information I am able to gather after a shallow analysis. I like Emily, enjoy the witty poems from my childhood. Maybe it’s because I have never really had to opportunity to mature my taste in poetry, or maybe it’s the childlike wonder in me that likes things concise and to the point.
1 Poetry leaves me confused
The images that poems and literary devices are supposed to develop in the mind of the reader are “not always visual” (Keats, in Bump 138). As I read this, I was confused. How can images not be visual? Even if they are not material images in front of your eyes, they are visual pictures within your mind. Apparently, it means “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Keats, in Bump 138). It is when the left and right sides of your brain meet and enhance your understanding of the poem. It’s the taser. Connection.
2 Connection between the right
and left hemispheres
If the point of literature, especially poems, is to connect the two sides of the brain and strengthen the sympathetic imagination, then why do poets make so many of the literary works so hard for the common poetry reader to understand? Denise McCluggage says, “When we use a metaphor, a spark arcs from Design to Sign mind, making a connection. The metaphor ass image resonates in the right bran with pictures, or complex wholes, which the left hemisphere expresses in words that imply a similarity in dissimilarity; in joining word and image, a sudden illumination takes place, a perception or insight that sheds new lights on a familiar feeling/idea/event” (McCluggage, in Rico, in Bump 140). But if this metaphor is convoluted or hard to understand, doesn’t it hinder the reading of the poem more than help it. Does it not promote disconnection and a breakdown of unity? These reading left me just as confused as I was before I began them.