What is it...

[abu nuwas]

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.

I very much agree with your last para, save that I prefer Armagnac. It might depend a little on whom I was speaking to, but to me it resembles telling someone about an idea or plan which I have, which is only in nascent or embryonic stages. The mere act, or fact, of telling seems to have the effect of deflating the thing, exactly like pricking a balloon.

Then there are poems which I am happy to speak about, and if there is something which on top of everything, is unsayable, I just tend to assume, despite knowing that it is not necessarily so, that the other person will pick up what I do.

I think your quote from Soren describes people, in part. I do not think it goes any further. If we had no labels, we should have no words, which would be a handicap. But even if everything in the world were labelled, humans, so far, would be incapable of retaining all the words. So for all of us, there great, unlabelled gaps, and for me, these always get more interesting when they touch on the interfaces of things, or of the real and unreal.

As for standards of beauty, they are paradoxical. On the one hand, there is the jolly old Zeitgeist whirling around the world, at ever greater speed, and with ever greater penetration. On the other, there are a number of old and hallowed things, which are taken as standards of beauty, almost without question, e.g., the Sistine Chapel.

I think, as it happens, that in a way, these were reflected in the 'Hollow Men' desire for tradition, contrasted with fragmentation, and change. Crikey, I've got serious, and unlike you, no Armagnac....