01-24-2012, 08:41 AM
To try and quantify beauty is difficult and risks destroying that beauty -- as Kierkegaard said, "once you label me, you negate me". We have, as a society, "standards of beauty" that I find so horrendously insulting and narrow-minded that I almost invariably go out of my way to avoid buying into them, particularly since the moment something is labelled "beautiful" because it's "unique", there are a million and thirty-two carbon copies available instantaneously so that the beautiful becomes the utterly mundane.
Poems are a little like people. There are some that many will agree are beautiful because they appeal to a broader cultural aesthetic -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- but there are some that only a few readers will love and that love is more difficult to explain. That doesn't make it less real.
Some poems will evoke a very strong reaction in me, beyond any rationality. I can write entire essays on how much I adore Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but doing so makes me feel sullied, as if I'm just breaking them down into components (I fell in love with him because of the hairs in his nose/ I love the way his little finger looks against a teacup). When someone asks me why I enjoy them so much, I'd rather just answer "because I do", then suggest they read them too -- if their reaction is different, I'm not offended. Similarly, when someone asks me why I hate Billy Collins with such a passion, I could go on for hours but just thinking about it makes me ill, so I'd rather just answer "because I do" and move on to the whisky.
Poems are a little like people. There are some that many will agree are beautiful because they appeal to a broader cultural aesthetic -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- but there are some that only a few readers will love and that love is more difficult to explain. That doesn't make it less real.
Some poems will evoke a very strong reaction in me, beyond any rationality. I can write entire essays on how much I adore Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but doing so makes me feel sullied, as if I'm just breaking them down into components (I fell in love with him because of the hairs in his nose/ I love the way his little finger looks against a teacup). When someone asks me why I enjoy them so much, I'd rather just answer "because I do", then suggest they read them too -- if their reaction is different, I'm not offended. Similarly, when someone asks me why I hate Billy Collins with such a passion, I could go on for hours but just thinking about it makes me ill, so I'd rather just answer "because I do" and move on to the whisky.
It could be worse